


Midway of Speech and Thought

by TheHousekeeper



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: F/M, London, Poetry, Seriously guys so much poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:53:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 62,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23744878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHousekeeper/pseuds/TheHousekeeper
Summary: Six months after the Battle of Sunnydale, Buffy is trying to settle into her new life in London: patrolling, training new Slayers, and studying English Literature. But it's not great for her grades that strange demons are appearing all over the city – and it's not great for her sanity that she's suddenly dreaming about Spike.And she only dreams when it rains.(Goes AU post-Chosen.)
Relationships: Spike/Buffy Summers
Comments: 31
Kudos: 67





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [Originally posted on Elysian Fields, November-December 2019]
> 
> I don't write a lot of fic, and when I do, I usually write one-shots. Nothing plotty. Nothing too long.
> 
> This… broke all the rules. More than 50,000 words of Buffy/Spike, dreaming, rain, London, and Theodore Roethke poetry, with some Sylvia Plath kicked in. And plot. So much plot. I'm terrible at plot. I really don't know, guys.
> 
> This story includes quotes from a fair amount of poetry and prose literature, including epigraphs for each chapter; it also borrows from several critical interpretations that are not my own. As much as possible, I'll be crediting these in the chapter end notes.
> 
> Lastly, but far from least, my heartfelt gratitude to my beta, the lovely stalwartsandall, who combines a preternaturally sharp eye, a comprehensive knowledge of English grammar, a critical pen, and a love of the characters and the world of Buffy. She caught my terrible typos and wrangled my penchant for overly long sentences. Any remaining errors are mine.

_There is no life after death. Why  
_ _should there be. What on_

_earth would have us believe this.  
  
_

_… Our  
_ _life, this is the afterdeath,_

_when we blink open, peeled and  
_ _ready to ache._

  
\+ + +  
  


_These waters drowse me into sleep so kind  
__I walk as if my face would kiss the wind._

  
\+ + +  
  


Buffy dreamed when it rained.

Maybe it was the quality of the air here, dense and fragrant and cool. Or maybe the sound. She wouldn’t _expect_ to hear the rain: the casement glass in the old house was thick and well sealed, muffling the sound of raindrops, and her bedroom was insulated from the roof by an attic. But there was a tree outside her window, an ancient rowan that stood in the corner made by the house and the yard’s mossy wall, and its feathery leaves amplified even a light drizzle.

She hadn’t had weather-dependent sleep habits before, but most things inside her head felt different now. Like her brain was a house that a stranger had tried to clean, only they’d put back everything in the wrong place and moved all the books around and repainted the walls, and now nothing seemed familiar and Buffy was constantly tripping over the same thoughts again and again, or looking for memories and seeing only blank space where they should be. And, apparently, she could only dream in the rain. 

Which is why she didn’t think the dreams were anything out of the ordinary, at first.

After all, October had well entrenched itself, and the London rain had settled in for the season. More often than not, Buffy went to bed with a cold misting damp outside.

She opened her eyes in Sunnydale.

There was none of the tumbled illogic that usually accompanied one dream sliding into another. She was on the sidewalk, outside her house. It was warm. The street was empty. The sun threw glare up from the sidewalk and made the pavement swim in Buffy’s vision. No sounds reached her of children or cars. A gentle breeze, soft on her skin, turned over the leaves on the trees and drifted a few strands of hair across her face.

Everything was just as it had been the last time she’d seen her house, down to the smallest detail, the kind of detail she normally wouldn’t expect in a dream. There was her bedroom window, halfway open to let in the summer air. There was the rust-coloured stain on the gate to the backyard, where she’d bled on the wood as the EMTs rushed her to the ambulance after Warren had shot her. The front steps needed repainting. Buffy was suddenly sucked under by a wave of guilt and sadness that she hadn’t done it, that now she never would, that the house had been destroyed with a bloodstain on the back gate and peeling paint on the stoop. 

Buffy stepped forward. She’d go inside, pace the quiet, sunlit rooms. Pick up objects and put them down again. Look at a picture, any picture, of her mother. It had been harder than she’d expected, to lose everything. It wasn’t the house she’d missed most, or the money, not her passport or birth certificate, but _things_. Photos. Her mother’s set of serving spoons. Mr. Gordo. The stupid little trinkets in her bedroom, the ones that were shortcuts to memories of happy times – vacations with her family when she was little, days at amusement parks with her friends from L.A. Buffy no longer owned anything that had a history attached to it. It made her feel untethered from the world. Like she might not be real.

She was three steps up the walk when the front door opened and Spike stepped out.

He stopped short, and she opened her mouth, but nothing came out; and she could feel her own surprise waking her up, and tried desperately to hold onto the dream, but it was fading –

“No!” she heard him say, and

“Spike,” she whispered, 

– and she woke in the gray light, with tears on her face, and the sound of rain on the window.

Other people were awake. She could hear footsteps, and doors opening and closing, and as she lay there, she heard Dawn come out of the bathroom across the hall, humming. The sound faded as Dawn moved off toward the main staircase, heading toward the kitchen. The new batch of Watchers – to their mild chagrin and, after a few days, their embarrassed pleasure – had begun to keep the pantry stocked with strawberry Pop-Tarts. They’d had to special-order them from the U.S.

Buffy listened until she could no longer hear Dawn’s skipping tread on the stairs, then threw off her blanket.

Twenty minutes later, quick-scrubbed and dressed, she padded into the kitchen herself. Dawn was pulling her second round of Pop-Tarts out of the toaster.

“Ouch ouch ouch,” she said, hot-potatoing the second one onto a plate.

“Jeez,” said Buffy. “Eat something that isn’t sugar, would ya?” She swiped the top Pop-Tart off the plate as Dawn passed.

“Hey! Get your own!” 

“Older sister’s privilege.” She let the frosting melt against her tongue. The sugar woke her up a little, grounded her. She closed her eyes and saw the scene again, as it had been the instant she’d awakened. It was seared on the back of her eyelids, and she opened her eyes again, trying not to see the desperate look that had been on Spike’s face.

He couldn’t feel desperate. He couldn’t feel anything. He was dead.

Something had been strange about that last moment before she’d woken up, though. Something wasn’t quite right.

“Do you have class today?”

Everything else had been so true to life. It had _smelled_ like Sunnydale: cut grass and California dust and the damp soil of cemeteries. The house, the trees… the shade on the right side of the porch, the sunlight on Spike’s hair, turning the platinum blond into a searing white that had made her half-blind even after she’d woken up…

The sunlight. On Spike’s hair.

“I said, do you have class today? Hello? Earth to Major Buffy!”

“Sorry, what?” Buffy blinked, and realized she was still holding the Pop-Tart. She took a step forward and put it down on the butcher-block surface of the kitchen island. “Sorry, Dawnie.”

“Psycho,” said Dawn affectionately, rolling her eyes and grabbing up the pastry. “I asked if you have class today.”

“Uh…” Class. What day was it? “No. It’s Friday, right?” 

“Yeah.” Dawn frowned. “Buffy, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Buffy took a breath of chilly, heavy air. A gust of wind spattered raindrops against the pane of the window above the sink. Dawn had only turned on one light, the big fixture that hung over the long, scrubbed-wood table. Most of the kitchen was dim in the blue gloom of the rainy morning. She glanced at the clock. “Shouldn’t you have left already?”

Dawn shook her head. She’d done her hair in pigtails, and they whipped back and forth. Rather than making her look younger, the hairstyle underscored the new narrowness of her maturing face. “Pat said he’d drive me, ‘cause it’s raining, so this way I don’t have to walk to the Tube stop and get soaked.”

Pat was one of the new Watchers, a stern, sixty-something Irishman whom Dawn had completely wrapped around her finger. Just then, he poked his head around the door. “Ready, Miss Summers?”

“Ready!” Dawn shoved the last two bites of Pop-Tart into her mouth. “Bye Buffy!” she said, spraying crumbs everywhere. Buffy waved. Dawn disappeared around the corner, and Buffy had to quell an insane urge to call her back, to tell her to skip school and keep her company instead.

She poured herself a cup of coffee from the automatic coffee maker and leaned back against the counter, inhaling the steam more than actually drinking the coffee. In her socked feet, she stood on one leg and pressed the sole of her other foot against her calf to warm it – the enormous travertine flagstones were frigid underfoot. Recently, there’d been a bit of a fire most mornings in the massive, vestigial hearth next to the industrial-size range, to keep the chill off. But no one had been in yet this morning to lay it. It was early still. Giles wouldn’t arrive from his townhouse for at least another hour; he kept a suite of rooms here that he used often, but he liked having his own space. Buffy wrapped her hands around her coffee mug and wandered out to see if Willow was awake yet.

She found her in the front part of the house, in one of the more office-y, headquarters-y rooms, which basically meant that it contained a desk and a chunky Dell desktop. Built-in cherry bookcases lined the back wall, three mismatched Persian rugs overlapped on the parquet floor, and the wheeled office chair was red leather with brass rivets. Willow was on the phone, a mug of tea steaming on the desk in front of her. She held up one finger as Buffy came in.

“Uh huh… and what time was that, did she say? …Okay… Okay. No, I agree, it’s most likely a natural event, but we’ll – yes, I agree. Thanks, Val. Hi Buffy!” Willow hung up the phone and took a sip of her tea.

“Morning. Xander still asleep?”

Willow was busy making a face at her too-big gulp of too-hot tea. “Think so.” 

“What did Val have for us?”

Willow shrugged. “Nothing big. One of the coven couldn’t sleep last night, so she happened to notice a minor fluctuation in the sixteenth-dimensional wall. It’s the kind of thing that happens all the time – dimensions bumping up against each other like… kind of like a room full of party balloons? You know, sometimes when they shift around a little, even though they pretty much stay in the same position relative to each other, they press on each other’s boundary walls? Anyway, Val just wanted to call it in in case there’s a bigger pattern that they didn’t know about.”

“Is there?” 

“Not as far as I know.”

Buffy looked out past Willow’s shoulder to the London street outside, where a constellation of black umbrellas hurried past. Not a single person looked at the gargantuan 17th-century mansion in the middle of the city. They knew it was there. They just didn’t _care_. It was eerie. Xander and Dawn had taken to calling the new Watcher headquarters Grimmauld Place to make light, a little, of the weirdness. It was a joke from the Harry Potter books, Buffy knew, but she’d never read them. Hadn’t had much time for reading, really, since the late ‘90s. 

“Buff, you all right? You’re kind of…”

“Quiet?” Buffy asked dryly.

“Distant.”

Buffy wanted to scream at her. She bit down, hard, on the bitter-copper surge of rage instead. It was too late, too long, to still be having these feelings, nearly six months after the closing of the Hellmouth. It wasn’t Willow’s fault, and it really was better that everyone else was happy; and, besides, Buffy was used, by now, to these volcanic flushes of anger churning up suddenly in her gut. She swallowed it down. 

“I’m fine. Guess I didn’t sleep well or something. I feel kind of… hazy.” Willow nodded sympathetically. “Think I’ll go work out for a bit. Clear the cobwebs out.” She left her coffee cup on the desk, three-quarters full, and went out.

Working out helped. It usually did. Cleaned her out, somehow, and she couldn’t think, could only move. Her body was one that wanted to remain in motion, and no outside force had yet been able to stop it. _Inertia_. That was the word. There was movement built into her muscles, a fight embedded in her bones. And any time it wasn’t allowed out, everything felt just a little _off_. No matter how tired she was of fighting. It was irresistible: it drew her on, it drew her out, it killed her by inches, and she couldn’t stop herself.

Giles found her in the basement gym not quite an hour later, half the lights off and half of them glaring on the blue-rubber flooring. She had sweated out the residual strangeness of her dream and was bouncing around a punching bag.

“Morning briefing,” said Giles from halfway down the stairs.

“You talk,” gasped Buffy. “I’ll punch.” 

“Really, Buffy, I’d prefer your full attention. While there’s nothing of concern today, I can’t help but feel that –”

“’S fine,” said Buffy, dodging a particularly crafty back-swing from the bag, “I’m listening.”

She’d known him too long, because she could tell that his mouth was doing that downturned disapproving thing just from his voice. “Fine.” He cleared his throat and glanced down at the sheaf of papers in his hand. “The Cleveland Hellmouth has begun to quiet down for the season, though Faith and Robin have reported a slight influx of migratory cold-weather demons moving down from Canada, apparently following an early snow. They’re largely harmless, but Faith is keeping an eye out, taking the situation seriously.”

“Wow,” grunted Buffy on a left jab, “Faith taking her job seriously. Guess it really is a cold day on the Hellmouth.”

“ _Buffy_ ,” said Giles, in his exasperated tone, but she caught sight of a smile that he didn’t entirely bother to hide.

“See? I can punch, pun, _and_ pay attention.”

“Quite.” Giles’s tone was dry. “Next… Andrew has located several Slayers in Russia and will be returning with them shortly.”

“And I bet his exact message included the words ‘freezing,’ ‘patootie,’ and ‘off.’”

“Angel reported in.”

Buffy mis-timed a hit on the bag and struck it awkwardly, feeling the impact shudder gratingly up her arm.

“Everything is quiet in California.”

She bit the inside of her cheek hard, embarrassed. Reset, struck the bag again.

“He asked after you. He’s… stopped calling. You must have noticed.”

She flubbed another punch and stopped, frustrated, sweaty. “What do you _want_ from me, Giles?” It came out different than she’d wanted: sadder, less angry, more weary, closer to tears.

He looked down, away from her. “I am hoping to see you smile again.”

Between them, the punching bag creaked on its chain, swinging heavily back and forth. Giles was still near the stairs, leaning against the wall. They’d never been affectionate, never demonstrative, not in gesture or in language. But she loved him, maybe even more now that she’d seen him make some really terrible decisions. God knew he’d seen her make a few stunners herself. She wanted, suddenly, to reach out and touch him. But that wasn’t what they did. Instead, she caught the bag between her hands, steadied it, quieted it. Sought around for a response. 

Nothing came. Buffy felt herself panicking. That had been the _one_ thing she could always rely on: having something to say. Mindless chatter at school, a witty retort while slaying, a scathing insult for Spike, a righteous speech to the Watchers’ Council. Now, nothing. It was like her brain was broken, or had been swapped out for someone else’s.

Giles waited for another moment, then rustled his papers to cover her unusual silence. “The new Watchers recovered the corpse of the demon you killed last night for identification. Speaking of which… why were you patrolling alone? You –”

“Yeah, _I know_ , I know, I’m supposed to take the girls on baby’s first group patrol.”

Though he frowned at her word choice, he refused to take the bait. “It’s just that, should you feel like going out, it would be extremely beneficial for them to –”

“What was it? The demon, what was it?”

Surprisingly, Giles took the hint. He wouldn’t have done that even a year ago, and Buffy ached at the thought of how careful he was with her now, how delicate. It reminded her of the few months immediately after her resurrection, which was not a time she preferred to be reminded of. “Ah… a Flauros. They’re jungle demons.” 

“That’s… weird.”

“Yes.”

“Did… do you think someone summoned it?”

“It’s a possibility. We’ll just have to wait and see if other strange demons begin appearing. If so, we can get Willow involved. Attempt to track them back to a single source."

“Like a magic homing beacon?”

“Something like that.”

“Cool.” Buffy gave the punching bag a half-hearted swipe to get it swinging again. “I’m going to shower.”

She pretended not to notice that he watched her all the way up the stairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epigraphs are from, respectively, "[Afterlife](https://poets.org/poem/afterlife-1)" by Natalie Eilbert and "The Renewal" by Theodore Roethke.


	2. Chapter 2

_I do not look for love that is a dream—  
__I only seek for courage to be still;  
__To bear my grief with an unbending will,  
__And when I am a-weary not to seem_ _._

\+ + +

The rain had blown off by mid-morning, though it left behind a blustery and biting day that made Buffy unwilling to go out. She didn’t have any meetings scheduled, either. She’d discovered that she was practically useless in meetings; she’d fidget constantly and pay so little attention that even the well-bred and very British Watchers had begun to sigh, take off their glasses, and massage the bridges of their noses whenever they saw her wander into a conference room. Three weeks ago, she’d been trapped in a windowless room listening to them discuss the _budget_. Like, how complicated was the budget? There was income – not that she really knew where it came from – and there were expenses, and you wanted the one to be less than the other.

But no, a lovely young Watcher with plum lipstick, an afro, and the poshest accent Buffy had ever heard had felt the need to talk about memoranda of understanding, and how to structure the trust funds for discretionary sub-contracting, and diversification, and maximizing endowment interest while retaining emergency liquidity, and charge codes for the country management units, and Buffy had burst out of the room _two and a half hours_ later, marched straight to Giles’s office, and demanded that she be involved in _absolutely no more meetings_ – or at least the bare minimum – or she was guaranteed to start threatening people with battle axes. She must have looked sufficiently murderous, because he’d agreed. And then she’d gone on patrol for six hours straight and killed nineteen vampires and come home and slept soundly for the first time in five days.

Ever since, she’d only been scheduled for a couple of meetings a week, and they were all short. And none of them involved the balding guy from Accounting with the constantly watering eyes, for which Buffy could only be thankful.

It also meant she had all day free and, with nothing else to do, that meant coursework reading, unappealing as it might be. In September, she’d started at King’s College London without attempting to transfer any credits. Fresh start, clean slate, new leaf, square one: there was a reason, Buffy thought, that English had so many idioms for the same thing.

Also, UC Sunnydale had been literally wiped off the map, so there probably wasn’t much chance of getting her old student records faxed to the King’s admissions office.

By the same logic, she’d made a clean break ( _clean break_ – there was another one) with most of her old subjects. Psychology was right out. Too many memories there. Adam, for starters. Maggie Walsh, for another, who – for all that she’d been a monomaniacal Frankensteinian psychopath – had been a pretty good lecturer, at least those times when Buffy had managed to stay awake in class. And Riley. That dream where he’d laid her down on the table in front of the class and kissed her. _If I kiss you, it’ll make the sun go down_.

And it had. It had.

The worst part about those memories: not all of them were awful.

So, no psychology. Or history. And no way was she doing anything that required math. “My brain gets enough ouchies being hit by stray vampire limbs,” she’d told Willow and Dawn one August evening as they lounged in the parlor, helping her select courses.

Frustrated, Buffy had thrown down her pencil and stolen the popcorn bowl from Dawn, who was sitting on the floor because Buffy was hogging the entire couch.

“Hey!”

“Older sister’s privilege.”

Willow was frowning down at her lap. She’d been trying, so far unsuccessfully, to learn how to knit. Val from the Devon coven had mentioned that it had helped her learn to see the threads that connected everything. But, so far, Buffy thought it was only helping her see threads all over the house, because Willow had a habit of abandoning her tangled yarn whenever she was struck by a new magic-y idea.

“Well,” said Willow, unpicking some stitches – or purls or whatever – “what classes did you like best at Sunnydale?”

“Aha!” said Buffy, dropping the bowl, which landed on the couch and promptly tipped over. Willow was brilliant. Buffy could pick _whatever major she wanted_. The revived Watchers Council existed by the grace of Buffy and Giles, and, as a result, there were a few hard rules written into its founding charter. Mostly they involved the sharing of all information with Slayers, no matter how irrelevant it seemed, and a moratorium on secret prophecies. But there was also a handy line stipulating a steady salary, housing, and perks for a certain Slayer Emeritus.

So Buffy didn’t _need_ a job. She might decide that she _wanted_ one, at some point, but that was a different kettle of demon guts. (And… ew, she was not loving that particular image.) Practically, it meant she could feel free to choose a major based on preference alone.

“You’re right! I don’t need a job – I have a calling. I just need a _degree_.”

“You don’t even need a degree,” said Dawn huffily, brushing scattered bits of popcorn away from her legs. “You kind of know everything you need for your line of work. Unless the King’s religion department offers Vampire Slaying 101 and I missed it in the catalogue.”

“Please,” said Buffy. “Like I would take that. I could _teach_ that. Talk about a _gut_ course.” Willow and Dawn had rolled their eyes, but Buffy was staring abstractedly into space, rubbing at her nose. “I liked that poetry class I had to quit when Mom got sick,” she mused. “Oh! And that class where you, me, and Tara read _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_. What was that?”

Willow snapped her fingers. “European Literature in the Victorian Age.”

“Maybe you should major in English lit,” said Dawn.

“Yeah,” Buffy had replied. “That sounds all right.”

So here she was, with an utterly untrammeled day, free to read Cosmo, paint her toenails fuchsia, and drink Dawn’s orange juice straight out of the carton – and instead, she was settling down at the long kitchen table with this week’s readings for American Poetics of the Post-War Era (“Fluidity and Form”).

This poetry seminar was hard for her. Sure, Brit Lit was not her strong suit – couldn’t Chaucer have spoken _regular_ English? But at least Chaucer was telling a story. She could get behind that. Stories meant what they said and said what they meant. With poetry, she could read a work three times and still not know what was going on, and every word was a land mine, ready to explode with meaning and packed full of shrapnel that would cut you down if you came at it the wrong way. She didn’t know how to _read_ poetry. It felt like a box she couldn’t find the catch for. All she could do was look at the outside and turn it over and over helplessly in her hands. 

Buffy thumbed through the packet of readings. Two medium-length essays – she’d leave those yawn-inducers for last. Several E. E. Cummings poems that were supposedly sonnets, though they looked nothing like the sonnets Buffy was familiar with. And poems by Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and a guy named Roethke (how did you even pronounce that?), all of which were in some poetic form called a villanelle.

Somewhat put off by the scattershot nature of the Cummings, Buffy started with the Bishop. She’d even heard some lines of “One Art,” though reading it now felt like ripping a vein open with a knife. And not a sharp one: rusty at the edges, dragging at her skin.

" _Then practice losing farther, losing faster:  
__places, and names, and where it was you meant  
__to travel…_

_—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture  
_ _I love)_

As soon as she finished, Buffy shoved it aside and pressed her hands against the smooth surface of the dark wood table. They rested there under the light, pale in contrast, not shaking. She breathed. She knew how to breathe to make herself calm. She’d learned this art. _So there,_ she thought to the dead Bishop. _Two arts. Not one. Losing. And breathing._

Puffing out a breath, Buffy pulled the Roethke forward. This one was a little easier, though it still felt a bit like navigating a minefield.

_I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.  
_ _I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.  
_ _I learn by going where I have to go._

_We think by feeling. What is there to know?  
_ _I hear my being dance from ear to ear.  
_ _I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow._

_Of those so close beside me, which are you?  
_ _God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,  
_ _And learn by going where I have to go._

_Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?  
_ _The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;  
_ _I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow._

_Great Nature has another thing to do  
_ _To you and me; so take the lively air,  
_ _And, lovely, learn by going where to go._

_This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.  
_ _What falls away is always. And is near._  
_I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.  
_ _I learn by going where I have to go._

This poem actually made some intuitive sense. It was how she felt now, always: waking to sleep, slowly. And figuring out what to do by doing what had to be done – wasn’t that how she’d always managed? One thing at a time. Find the demon, fight it, work out the next step.

And: _I feel my fate in what I cannot fear_. She knew what this Roethke guy was talking about there. _Cannot fear_ … Did he mean that he just couldn’t make himself be frightened, or that he wasn’t _supposed_ to be frightened? Just because you were supposed to be unafraid of something didn’t mean that you weren’t actually scared of it when you’d turned out the lights and you were all alone in the vast night. Buffy had spent most of her teenage years being scared stiff by her own destiny, trying to avoid it at all costs. But in the end, you couldn’t really be afraid of what you were meant to do, what you were _made_ to do.

So that made sense, even if she couldn’t quite figure out what he meant with the worm and the tree. The Tree of Life? She made a note in the margin.

_What falls away is always. And is near_.

No. No, it wasn’t.

Buffy clenched her jaw and pushed the page aside, revealing the Sylvia Plath poem underneath: “Mad Girl’s Love Song.”

She didn’t make it all the way through those nineteen lines.

She left the papers on the table and went back down to the gym, where things made sense and she didn’t have to think. She hit the treadmill and ran for miles, working up a clean sweat, bumping the pace up higher and higher, until she was flat-out sprinting, until her hands shook and her heart hammered and her legs ached and she stopped, panting, doubled over, tired, so tired, everything hurting and nothing better, and Spike still in her head, his hair shining in the sun because it wasn’t real, he was gone, he was gone, he was gone gone gone.

\+ + +

By the time she’d showered, Dawn was home from school, and they watched reruns of _Murder, She Wrote_ together until dinnertime.

Dinner was usually a busy, casual affair, with people coming in and out, getting up and sitting down at the long trestle table, the bench scraping loudly over the travertine tiles. The London-based slayers had their own facility down the street; this house was Watcher country. Around a dozen Watchers would show up to dinner on any given day. Giles was always there, and Buffy, Dawn, Willow, and Xander, who was usually fresh from a job site and smelling not unpleasantly of sweet wood and sour sweat. 

“Xander, you’re leaving sawdust on the bench again,” Dawn pointed out. 

“Hey,” Xander replied through a thick bite of mashed potatoes. “I work all day, I bring home the bacon, I sweat to put food in our mouths, and this is the thanks I get?”

“I think we’d all appreciate it more if you’d _keep_ the food in your mouth,” Dawn retorted with a look of disgust. “Buffy, you going to finish that pork chop?” 

“Oh,” said Buffy, recalling her attention back to her plate. She’d evidently been pushing a lonesome pork chop around with her fork. “No, you can have it.”

Giles was looking at her pointedly, but he wouldn’t say anything, not with ten Watchers around them, their low talk about documents and references and recent demon appearances thrumming quietly in the air.

“Richard was saying that they had a pair of Foedorn demons hanging around a village north of Edinburgh late last night,” Cynthia was explaining to Pat. “Can you believe that?”

“What’s weird about that?” Buffy asked.

Dawn rolled her eyes. “Honestly, it’s like you never pay attention when we research. Foedorn are desert demons.”

“So?”

“ _So_ , no deserts in Scotland. _Duh_.”

“Right,” said Buffy. “Sorry, I’m kind of out of it. Didn’t sleep well. I think I’ll make an early night of it.” With an ease born of practice, she extricated herself from the bench without pushing it back and yawned ostentatiously.

“I thought you were going to finish your reading tonight,” said Willow, in a mildly disapproving tone.

“It can wait until tomorrow. I’ll let you nag me about it then.”

Willow smiled, and Buffy slipped away upstairs.

In her room, she threw open the window and breathed deep. The air was cold, but carried a damp scent of clean freshness. A light, misting drizzle had started up again and eased over the rowan tree, over the still-lush grass and the mossy back wall. The garden smelled of wet, green things, with the melancholy undertone of autumnal decay. Buffy lay down in bed with a magazine, the bedside lamp casting a warm golden glow over the room, and the breeze trickling over her face

and woke up in Sunnydale.

She knew where she was immediately: Restfield Cemetery, outside Spike’s crypt. Now that she knew what to look for, there was an indication that it wasn’t real: the door didn’t creak as she pushed it open. It always used to creak. She’d thought that Spike made sure it did, so he’d have a half-second warning when she came by to rough him up.

Her dreaming mind produced the image it knew best: Spike lounging in a chair with his back to the door, drinking a beer and watching TV. Now, though, the screen showed only static; the light it cast was white-blue and dim, like moonlight. It was so achingly familiar, so domestic, that Buffy’s chest hurt.

Despite the silent door, Spike seemed to sense she was near. He turned in his chair. “You’re back.”

God, his voice. Buffy closed her eyes and listened to its echoes in the stone. It twanged some chord of longing in her, vibrated deep.

“It _is_ my dream,” she said. 

“What do you mean?” he asked with appropriate dream-logic.

Buffy drifted over the floor until she was beside him, until she could cup his cool cheek in one palm.

She expected to wake up, but she didn’t.

His eyes closed for a moment. She’d forgotten: how pale he was, so pale the delicate veins beneath the translucent skin of his eyelids showed shadow-blue.

“I miss you,” she whispered.

“Don’t leave, then,” he said.

Her mouth quirked. “Even in my dreams, you’re contrary.”

So blue, his eyes. Blue as the sky over Sunnydale, black as the ground below. She ought to know. _This shaking keeps me steady,_ she remembered. _I should know._ Furrows had appeared around Spike’s eyebrows, gentle rolls in the skin like someone had planted and plowed. With her thumb, Buffy pressed the flat space between his eyebrows to ease them, and Spike’s eyes closed again.

“Where are you?” he whispered. “Where are you now?”

“London,” she said softly.

Could you call it a smile, Buffy wondered, if there was nothing amused about it?

“London,” he repeated. “I miss it.” His London was gone, Buffy knew, long gone. But she didn’t say it. He knew. And he was dead. No use in hurting him anymore. No way she could, even.

There should have been some solace in that.

“Miss _you_ ,” he breathed.

Buffy’s throat hurt. Not an ache, but a sharp pain: a lump pressing into the soft tissues there, one so large she couldn’t breathe around it. “You can’t miss me,” she said. Her voice broke. She was beginning to notice herself, her body, a chill draft. “You’re dead. This is a dream.”

This time, when his mouth quirked, there was a hint of laughter behind it. “Dreaming of me, love?”

“Always,” she whispered, and she woke.

It was dark out. Early morning hours, maybe. Rain was blowing in, beading on the hardwood, soaking the edge of the rug. At her back, the bedside lamp was still burning. The room was cold. For a moment, Buffy just lay there, staring out the window at the nothingness it opened into. Then she sat up, noticing that she was still in her clothes, and walked over, placing her hands on the window sash to close it.

Tired. God, so tired. Tired of getting up every day, of putting on the right face as if she chose it like a blouse from her closet. Tired of going out each night to find things to kill, tired of being _tired_ of it, because that was an old story by now. So tired her muscles ached. There was the bed, and the warm light, and it was Saturday tomorrow. All she had to do was close the window, change into pyjamas, snuggle under the covers with that bone-deep relief of being at ease after a long day.

Instead, as if her body was acting of its own will, Buffy gripped the window frame and swung herself out into the night.

There were demons out there. She knew by now which ones to chase, and which to leave well enough alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The fic title is from "[Light of the House](https://poets.org/poem/light-house)," by Louise Imogen Guiney.
> 
> This chapter's epigraph is from "[Lady Montrevor](https://poets.org/poem/lady-montrevor)," by Christina Rossetti.
> 
> Some dialogue is quoted from 4x10, "Hush."
> 
> For those interested, E. E. Cummings's sonnets do, in fact, look like sonnets for the most part, with some simple variations. A couple good examples are "[i thank you God for most this amazing](https://gladdestthing.com/poems/i-thank-you-god-for-most-this-amazing)" and "[no man, if men are gods](https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/etinarcadiaegoy/no-man-if-men-are-gods-but-if-gods-must-t679.html)," which is one of my favourite poems in the world. You could, however, interpret some of his more abstract pieces as sonnets if you really wanted to, which seems like something Buffy's poetry professor might do just for the hell of it.
> 
> Buffy's confusion over how to pronounce Theodore Roethke's surname is entirely understandable, but if she'd done a little digging, she'd have discovered that it's RET-kee. The poem she reads, which means a great deal to me personally, is "[The Waking](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43333/the-waking-56d2220f25315)."
> 
> Here's the full version of "[One Art](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art)," by Elizabeth Bishop.
> 
> If you want to know more about villanelles – a really cool poetic form that I love – the American Academy of Poets has a [good explanation](https://poets.org/glossary/villanelle) of them on their website. If you grew up in the U.S. or the U.K., you've probably read at least one of these: Dylan Thomas's "[Do not go gentle into that good night](https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night)."


	3. Chapter 3

_For the world invades me again,  
__And once more the tongues begin babbling._

\+ + +

“The novel seems to suggest,” said Professor Winslow in her Irish burr, “a directly proportional relationship between the _distance_ over which communicative acts take place and how _meaningful_ they are.”

Monday morning, nearly eleven. Gray outside, puddles drying slowly in the cold. Between her fingers, Buffy’s pen twirled, twirled again.

“We have, on the one hand,” went on Winslow, “Helen Burns’s manifesto. She talks to Jane of the ‘spark of spirit’ within the human soul, which is ‘perhaps again to be communicated to some being higher than man’ – _communicated_ , that’s the word she uses. Why ‘communicated’? Why not just say ‘transformed’? That’s what she means, isn’t it? That when we die, our souls become something greater?”

Buffy actually liked her Victorian Realist Fiction class. She liked Winslow, with her crisp black hair, and her habit of forgetting her coffee, then sipping from it near the end of class and making a face because it had gone cold. Something about her made Buffy feel tender, protective.

She pressed her pen to her notebook and wrote _Helen Burns: spirit communicated, not transformed_ , without really knowing what she was doing.

That spark of spirit within the human soul.

_There’s no spark. Ain’t we in a soddin’ engine?_

“Come on, folks. Not a rhetorical question. Why ‘communicated’?”

In the front row, a dark-haired boy shifted awkwardly. “Well, it’s got two meanings, hasn’t it? Transformed, like you said, but mostly to talk. I guess she wanted that second meaning, too. Right?”

“All right,” said Winslow. She left the podium and paced slowly across the dais. Buffy moved her pen over to the margin of her page and started doodling tiny linked circles. “So she’s saying that the soul is changed with death into something greater, but also that it’s _told_ to someone ‘higher than man.’ To God. What do we normally call that, talking to God?”

A girl near the window called out, “Praying.”

“Prayer.” Winslow nodded. “The most privileged kind of communication. The most sacred. Now, I don’t know quite what it means to _tell_ someone a soul, but if the soul is a communicated message, it would be difficult to think of one with greater worth or meaning. Nor would it be easy to find a distance as great or unbridgeable as that between ourselves and God. Or ourselves and what lies beyond death.”

The linked circles, in a drooping line, looked like a chain. Buffy switched to flat lines, angles.

“So we have the most important kind of message, being communicated across an infinite chasm. Later, we see another message of great import – though on a more human scale – travelling over a seemingly impassable distance.” Winslow had arrived back at the podium. She lifted her glasses from where they hung on a chain around her neck and began to read from her copy of the novel.

“ _As I exclaimed ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’_ – this is Rochester, remember, in a condition of deep pain and distress – _As I exclaimed ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’_ _a voice—I cannot tell whence the voice came, but I know whose voice it was—replied, ‘I am coming: wait for me;’ and a moment after, went whispering on the wind the words—‘Where are you?’_ ”

Winslow removed her glasses again. “Life-saving communication across miles of distance. A miracle,” she said. “Like prayer. Like the soul.”

_The spark. The missing… the piece that fit. That would make me fit._

“Now, this is in contrast to the kind of talking that’s merely noise. And there’s plenty of that in the novel, too. Remember, when Jane is at Lowood as a teacher, she shares a room with another teacher and at one point complains of her ‘prolonged effusion of small talk’ – that’s page one hundred and two. And with Bertha Mason, communication breaks down entirely. Language is reduced to noise. These are things that happen at close range. Immediacy. Flesh.”

_I dreamed of killing you. I think they were dreams._

“So we have intimate spaces filled with empty, meaningless chatter,” continued Winslow, and it was like she was talking over Spike, like both were real. _I think they were dreams_. “And we have great distances across which travels vitally important meaning. Where there is infinite, unquantifiable distance, we have a message of infinite, unquantifiable worth.”

“Sounds like a math equation,” Buffy said without thinking, and raised her head to find the whole class looking at her.

“It does,” agreed Winslow. “Very logical. Just like Jane. Only logic seems to have nothing to do with it – not with prayer, and not with the miracle that allows Rochester to hear her, from deep in his extremity. With what allows her to reach into his darkness and take his hand. So why? Why would Brontë set up this relationship between distance and communicative meaning?”

Winslow was still looking at her, so Buffy struggled to respond, to say anything that wouldn’t make her sound like an idiot. _We think by feeling. What is there to know?_ “Maybe… maybe because distance creates… constraints. Like, when you’re nearby someone, talking is easy. Well,” she corrected herself, with at least a little self-aware irony, “theoretically.” A few people chuckled. “You can say any old thing that comes into your head, it all pours out so easily, so none of it has to matter much. But if you’re going to try to reach someone who’s far away, if communication is… hard, or, or dangerous, then what you’re saying had better be worth it. It’d better be important. It’d better be the most important thing you ever say.”

Buffy looked down at the margins of her paper, at her doodle. A chain, with something hanging from it, a gem of some kind, a necklace. An amulet. She pushed the paper away. Her pen tumbled to the floor. “And even then, they might never hear it,” she said quietly.

Winslow nodded again. “It’s an act of faith,” she agreed.

The boy beside her reached down and picked up her pen for her. He had sandy hair, nice eyes. Monday morning, nearly eleven. Buffy hadn’t slept all weekend. Her exhausted brain seemed to skip out on reality for a moment. Everything felt dissociated, unreal. The boy’s face turned into a mask, turned back into a face. When she took the pen from him, her fingers shook.

 _I think they were dreams_.

\+ + +

A dry cold wind was blowing as Buffy walked down the street, having dropped off her school stuff at the mansion and changed into training clothes. In one hand, she was carrying a long black leather case. As she waited for the light to change at the end of the block, a handsome guy around her age nodded at it. “Nice. I play too.”

“Huh?”

He was clean-cut, his olive skin a pleasingly arresting contrast to his pale blue shirt. Over the shirt he was wearing a suit, the tie loosened now for his walk home. Buffy imagined that he lived in a tidy, overpriced studio flat, the kind with stainless steel appliances and gray laminate flooring. There would be a houseplant or two, a coffee maker. Yogurt and milk in the fridge, next to takeout containers. In a different life, it would be appealing to her. She’d longed for simplicity, for normality, for a bare floor and a small room. She remembered longing for it. And he was single; only single men bothered talking to her now, although she managed somehow to put even them off quickly. This guy was already looking confused and hesitant. He pointed to the case in her hand. “Your trombone.”

“Oh. Right.” Buffy gave a half-laugh that he didn’t seem to realize lacked amusement of any kind. “Yeah, I sure love the – trombone.”

Some god was smiling on her – amazing, since she thought she’d alienated every deity out there; gods didn’t seem to like her much – because at that moment the light changed, and she was able to lose him in the crowd.

The slayers’ facility was just a block and a half down the street. From the outside, it was an ordinary-looking small office building, with the name of a solicitors’ firm and a dental practice on the door in peeling white letters: Herriot & Baker, LLP; Bright Smiles Dental Centre. The top half of the B in “Baker” and the “re” of “Centre” had rubbed off the tinted glass, leaving a translucent outline, a backwards shadow. The only hint that everything was not as it seemed was the digital code pad beside the door, on which Buffy keyed in her ID number, the pound sign, and then her PIN. A _snick_ told her the mechanism had disengaged.

There were magical defenses, too, but Buffy wasn’t sure what exactly they consisted of. Willow had helped set them up just after they’d arrived in London, when the Council had bought the building, and Buffy didn’t remember much from the first three weeks after Sunnydale.

The girls, over thirty of them, were in the training room, which was much bigger than the gym at Grimmauld Place and took up the entire sub-basement. The facility was so new that Buffy could still smell paint and rubber.

It was the end of the day and, under the sharp eyes of Kennedy and two Watchers, the slayers were taking turns sparring one-on-one while the rest of the group drank water, stretched, and hollered encouragement at the combatants. Quietly, Buffy took a place along the wall and watched the two girls on the mats in the center of the room.

One of them was tall and broad, with curly red hair and a wicked right hook. A farm girl, Buffy decided, a girl used to hauling lambs out of ravines and holding calves still for their shots. A strong, well-fed girl. One with brothers. She moved with the confidence of strength and the cool, untroubled assurance that came from knowledge of her own capability. Someone with nothing to prove, someone for whom the world had never held terrors. There was something attractive in that quality, Buffy knew. Angel had moved like that.

 _I feel my fate in what I cannot fear_ , she remembered, the words of the Roethke poem coming back to her again. 

The other slayer was even shorter than Buffy, with rust-dark skin and a sharp chin. Her movements were clipped, condensed somehow, as if she were trying to save energy, or compress it all beneath her skin. She spun and jabbed and ducked like a flicker of light on the edge of a sword.

But she was losing, badly. She was overmatched, undersized. All the redhead had to do was be patient. A too-slow dodge cost the smaller one a fist to the cheekbone, and a collective _ooh_ of sympathy escaped from the watching slayers.

“Come on, Miri!” one of them yelled. “You got this!”

Miri was tiring; it was obvious to everyone. But there was something off about it, although Buffy couldn’t quite put her finger on what. She felt like the girl was holding back. And then, as Miri deflected a kick, Buffy saw her face for a moment, and she grinned. The girl had a plan.

The next kick landed, square on Miri’s sternum. She flew across the floor and fell heavily on her back, struggling to breathe through flattened lungs. Unhurried, the redhead girl approached, ready to strike the final blow. Miri gasped, fish-mouth gaping, eyes clenched tight. And then, just as the redhead came within reach, Miri planted her palms behind her own head and kipped herself over backwards in a reverse handspring, clipping the redhead hard under the chin with her feet as she spun.

A cheer rose from the watching slayers, and Buffy smiled wryly. She loved that move. She’d succeeded with it six times that she could remember, even though Giles always complained when she used it in training. Too risky, he said. It took strength, coordination, and a keen instinct for timing. Judging the right moment was harder than it seemed.

Now the fight was really on. The floor mats could no longer contain the fighters. They flew around the room, each looking for space to maneuver, pushing off of the walls, pulling down gymnastics equipment to trip each other up, deaf to the complaints of the two Watchers.

Miri picked up a wooden practice sword; the redhead wrapped it up in a hanging climbing rope and ripped it away, then lashed the knotted end of the rope against the back of Miri’s calves. Miri fell, and the redhead lunged for a nearby bucket of dull stakes, whipping one toward her opponent just as Miri got her feet under her. With a grunt of effort, the small girl dodged left and the stake flew past her ear, through the air –

Straight into the case Buffy had hastily swung up in front of her face.

The cheers died away. Dead silence. Embedded in the case, the stake quivered. Buffy slowly lowered the case to examine it. She looked at the redhead girl, who stood paralyzed, sweaty and terrified.

“Nice one,” said Buffy.

Kennedy nodded to her. “Hey, Buffy,” she said. “Any comments?” 

Buffy shrugged. “That was fun to watch. Miri, right?” The girl nodded. “You got caught up in the moves and forgot to note your surroundings. That’s how she pulled the trick with the rope. Always have an eye on what can be used as a weapon – either by your opponent, or by you. Great move, though, with the handspring.” She turned to the other one. “And – sorry, I forget your name.”

“Shiv,” said the big girl in an Irish country burr. “Well, Siobhan, but everyone calls me Shiv.”

“I like it,” said Buffy, grinning. “Shiv, never, ever go into a fight assuming you’ll win. Last time I got too cocky, I got staked in the gut.” She touched her stomach, right below her ribcage, and remembered Riley, his warm hands taping the gauze for her. Remembered fighting that night with Spike in the alley behind the Bronze. _Every Slayer has a death wish. Even you_. She swallowed. “Right here.” Grimaces of sympathy appeared on the slayers’ faces. “Learned my lesson. When your opponent is down, when you think you’ve got them beat – that’s when they get desperate. It’s when you should be the most careful.”

Shiv nodded, deadly serious. One of the other slayers turned to Kennedy.

“How come you never tell us stuff like that?” she asked. “It’s always, _Hold your fists up,_ or _Duck more, punch less,_ or _No one wants to hear your stupid puns, Emily_.”

“Punning is a slayer’s most sacred duty,” Buffy told her soberly. “The vampire-killing stuff is secondary.”

That broke the restrained mood. The two combatants relaxed a little and made their way back to the group. Shoulders were slapped, water offered. The two Watchers, with a long-suffering look at each other, started to right all the knocked-over equipment.

“All right, all right!” called Kennedy. “Take a seat, guys.” Slowly, the girls settled on wooden benches, still chattering. “I asked Buffy here to show you something.”

Buffy walked toward them and set the case on the floor. Then she knelt, popped open the buckles, and pulled out the scythe.

There was no talking now. Thirty-four sets of eyes were glued to its shiny surface, which never got smudged by sweaty fingers and was never cool to the touch. They could sense its power, Buffy knew. Something in them was reaching out for it, something they didn’t understand. She remembered it herself, not understanding the thing inside her, and the memory made her gentle with them, as if they were children. She handed it to the first girl on the bench, who took it with a mix of caution, eagerness, and reverence.

“Pass it around,” said Buffy. “Handle it. Feel its power. This is your weapon. This is a weapon for slayers. Part of our power lives in it. The scythe reflects that power and is an extension of it. Of you. Of _us_.”

The girls farther down the line were practically vibrating with their need to put their hands on it; each slayer was reluctant to let it go. “How did you get it?” asked one, a black girl whose hair was held back by a green paisley bandana. “Was it passed down the Slayer line?”

“Not – not exactly.” Buffy’s eyes jumped to Kennedy and then away. Kennedy was their trainer. They had to trust her. Even if Buffy couldn’t. And too much of the story of the scythe was painful. Even the one good part: two nights in beds that weren’t hers, and Spike’s arms around her in the dark. Even that hurt. Especially that. “We… found it. Before the Battle of Sunnydale.”

At that, the girls’ faces registered an ecstatic awe, like they were in the presence of a religious pantheon. The Battle of Sunnydale had achieved the status of legend – mostly, Buffy suspected, because no one who’d actually lived through it could bear to talk about it. Not yet, anyway.

With reverent hands they passed the scythe down the line, while Buffy told them about its history and what it could do. “Never forget, though,” she said, “that it’s a weapon. And every weapon can betray you. This one can’t be turned against us, we think – but it _can_ be lost, or taken away. You can’t rely too much on weapons, or you’ll be helpless without them. When it comes down to it, you’re the only weapon that counts. Your brains, your feet and fists.

“Remember,” she went on, “vampires don’t need to reach for a weapon. They’ve already got theirs.”

Kennedy, who knew her better than anyone else in that room, seemed to twig to something. Maybe the echo of someone else’s cadence in her words. “Another lesson you learned, chief?” she asked drily.

Buffy gave her the sweetest fake smile she could muster, but she couldn’t make this about Kennedy’s bitchiness. There were girls in the room who needed to hear what she was saying. “Painfully,” she said, because it was true, if not accurate: Spike’s lesson hadn’t hurt, per se, but his words had been torture. Buffy felt her face twist into sadness, and turned away from Kennedy’s sharp judgmental eyes. 

Miri – who, because she’d been the farthest away, was the last girl on the back bench – brought the scythe back. As Buffy knelt to replace it in the case, something surged through the weapon. Her arm went tingly, half-numb. “Whoa.”

It was as if the scythe were vibrating, like its atoms were reacting to an internal agitation and suddenly wanted to get away from each other, or from the world. Whatever it was, it had only peaked for a second; the sensation was already fading. 

“Kennedy,” she said sharply. “Come check this out.”

Kennedy jogged over and placed her hand just above Buffy’s, halfway up the shaft. She frowned.

“Did you feel that?” Buffy asked.

“Think I got the tail end of it, but yeah. What was it?”

“I have no idea.”

They looked at each other, communicating silently. Considering their history with the scythe – its sudden appearance concurrent with the First Evil’s – Buffy really didn’t like it doing anything unexpected. And whatever had just happened felt uncomfortably like a warning.

“Willow?” asked Kennedy.

Buffy nodded and nestled the scythe back into its case. “Willow,” she confirmed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's epigraph comes from Theodore Roethke's "The Abyss."
> 
> The novel under discussion in the first scene of this chapter is, of course, _Jane Eyre_ , by Charlotte Brontë. The arguments laid out by Professor Winslow in that scene are **not my ideas**. They come courtesy of the brilliant Victorian scholar Jeff Nunokawa, a professor of English literature at Princeton University. If I recall correctly, his eventual (fascinating) point is that, in _Jane Eyre_ , Brontë highlights the ways in which all communication is, like prayer, ultimately an act of faith, as we can never be sure whether our intended meaning will reach our listener the way we want or expect.
> 
> This chapter also contains dialogue from 7x02, "Beneath You," and from 5x07, "Fool for Love."
> 
> A couple of quotes from Roethke's "The Waking" show up, too.


	4. Chapter 4

_The soul has many motions, body one._

\+ + +

“It was nothing.”

It was very late, past midnight, and the light over the long table in the kitchen was the only illumination. Outside, the wind tossed the branches of the oak by the kitchen window. Buffy curled her hands around her mug of chamomile tea and wished it were hot chocolate.

“You didn’t feel it, Will. It didn’t feel like nothing.”

Willow shrugged, not looking up from her knitting. Buffy tilted her head at the tangle of yarn. It was a bright red… scarf? Maybe? Usually, scarves didn’t look quite so scrunched at the edges. Buffy decided not to ask.

“The coven said it was just a shiver in the interdimensional walls. Remember the fluctuation last week? Same idea. It’s probably just a small disturbance propagating through.”

“But I felt it through the scythe. Why would I feel it?”

“Right, so, the scythe is sensitive to mystical energy.” Willow set down her knitting; she had her excited magic-explaining face on. “It picks up fluctuations and amplifies them. It’s like a… a big radio antenna, receiving signals.”

“Are we talking AM/FM signals? Or Star Trek-style alien transmissions?”

Willow subjected her to a disapproving side-eye. “You’ve been spending too much time with Xander.”

“Okay, _maybe_ I watched the first season of _The X Files_ with him and Dawn, but it was my parental duty! I had to make sure that it was appropriate viewing material for Dawn, right? I mean…” Buffy frowned. “It was pretty freaky.”

“Of course,” said Willow, grinning. “But don’t worry. No extraterrestrial communiqués here. We’re talking more… Beyoncé and the traffic report. Regular fluctuations and signals in your run-of-the-mill mystical energy.”

Buffy tapped a fingernail against the rim of her mug. “You’ll tell Giles, though? Sorry, Will, I trust you, it’s just that, with this and some… other stuff – well, it just kind of has me…”

“Freaked? I get it. Sure, I’ll tell Giles. But seriously, Buffy, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“All right.” Buffy pushed her almost untouched tea away and stood up. “I’m heading to bed.”

“Night!”

Upstairs, Buffy closed the door on the shadowy stone hall and flicked on all three lamps in her small, cozy room. Willow and Xander both had bigger rooms down the hall. Giles had a whole suite – a bedroom, a parlor, and a study that housed his personal book collection, a pretentiously British carved desk and wingback armchair, and multiple bottles of aged scotch. And Dawn’s sprawling room across the hall could have been used for football practice.

But Buffy had picked this room in the corner because it seemed the homiest, and because it looked out over the back garden rather than the street, and one of its windows gave directly into the branches of the rowan tree. Even though she no longer had to worry about sneaking out of the house for patrol without Mom hearing, she could still appreciate a quick escape route.

And someone had told her that this had been a music room in the mansion’s earliest days. She liked the thought that maybe there was still music here, a whole melodic spectrum of joy and despair and love and loss, that the notes had seeped into the stone. Things like that could linger, she hoped, like the smell of woodsmoke.

The room was cold; the weather had been chilly, and the window was open a crack. Buffy crossed the room and slid it shut, then stood for a while looking down into the dark garden. Through the glass, she could hear the susurration of the last clinging rowan leaves turning over in the wind. For a second, she thought she saw a shape move down on the ground, something walking confidently through the shadows by the wall.

She froze, waiting for the wind to scatter a cloud, or to toss a tree branch away from a streetlight, or for the shape to emerge. Near the corner of the garden, it hesitated, then gathered itself to leap in one motion to the top of the wall, and Buffy saw it clearly against the buildings beyond.

It was a cat.

Roughly, Buffy drew the curtains closed, and got ready for bed.

The next few days continued dry, cold, and gusty. Buffy spent all her free time on her schoolwork, which, with final papers looming, seemed to have doubled itself over the weekend like a bacterial colony. At night, she patrolled until late, then rolled herself into bed for a few short hours until she had to wake up for class. Her sleep was brief, heavy, and dreamless.

It was more than the sleep of the dead, which she’d slept before. That was rest. This was oblivion.

Even with the extra hours of patrol, she didn’t see anything that would be cause for a warning from the scythe – just the usual run of vampires and minor demons. On Wednesday night, she even busted down the door of a couple of demon bars, just to see if there were whispers of anything more going on. The patrons mentioned there’d been more out-of-towners than usual for this time of year, but they put that down to a booming economy.

Buffy made sure to buy herself a drink at each place to keep up goodwill. The barkeeps and patrons here in London didn’t seem to mind her presence quite as much as Willy and his customers had in Sunnydale. London boasted a more cosmopolitan milieu, she guessed. There were even a few humans hanging around, usually punk-rock kids with dyed hair, leather jackets, and lip rings. At the last bar, Buffy complimented one of them on her kick-ass combat boots, then left. 

The Watchers, the coven, and their networks confirmed the rumours Buffy had heard in the bars. There were intermittent reports from across the country of weird, foreign demons, like the desert demon in Scotland, but there wasn’t a pattern. Many weren’t even violent. It didn’t seem like anything more than a heavy tourist season.

“Demons go on vacation?” Xander asked, miffed. “ _I_ don’t get a vacation, but _demons_ do? What, they just hop on Demon Air and jet off to a sunny getaway in Honolulu?”

“Actually, yeah,” put in Dawn from inside the pantry, where she was liberating all the chocolate digestives from the package. She poked her head out to find everyone staring at her. “What? Spike told me that most of the night crew at all the major airports are demons. Apparently, there’s this whole underground network of flights for demon travellers. I mean, not _literally_ underground, because they’re, you know, planes. But how else would they get around, you know? The planes are even made special – they’ve got glass that blocks UV light. For vampires and the other… sun-allergic.”

“Really?” asked Giles, fascinated. “Are the pilots demons as well?”

Dawn shrugged. “Some of them, Spike said. Not all. And about half the flight crews.”

“Huh,” said Xander. “Well, that _definitely_ explains some of the grouchy flight attendants I’ve encountered.”

“Dawnie,” yawned Buffy, short on sleep and only half-awake over her first mug of coffee, “cookies aren’t breakfast.”

“Good thing these aren’t cookies, then!” Dawn said brightly. “They’re _biscuits_.” She shook the packet at Buffy. “Want one?”

“Yes,” grumped Buffy, and took two. She dipped one into her mug and withdrew it, looking sleepily at the line where the hot coffee had started to melt the chocolate. Dreamily, she took a little nibble and let the sugar coat her tongue. _I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow_.

Poetry class this morning. They were going to talk about that poem, and the Cummings ones, which she’d never actually gotten to, and the Bishop. And the Plath, which Buffy secretly hoped they’d run out of time for. It hurt like a stab wound, like a knife to the gut. Even the title. _Mad Girl’s Love Song_. Every time she recognized one of its lines careening through her brain, Buffy tried hard to think about something, anything, else.

But the Roethke poem – the Roethke poem wouldn’t leave her alone, and that one she liked having around. It felt like a companion. It kept popping up, different parts of it every time, and it was comforting, like having a warm dog at her heels. Something with its own instinctual intelligence that knew her well, and loved her anyway. She’d written it down on a half-sheet of printer paper and pasted it to the wall right beside her bed, above the nightstand.

_What falls away is always. And is near._

_And is near._

\+ + +

“This is quite a mysterious line,” said Professor Edwards.

Edwards was young for a prof – mid-forties, maybe, and American, with rectangular wire-framed glasses and a wave of sandy hair perpetually blown back from his forehead. He was handsome and charming, made only very slightly less handsome and charming by the fact that he knew it. “ _I wake to sleep_. _I wake to sleep_. How can we interpret this?” With a wry grin, he held up a hand. “No need to get philosophical on me. I’m talking on a grammatical level. _I wake to sleep_. Someone parse that for me.”

Buffy glanced surreptitiously around the long table, trying not to catch Edwards’s eye. This was a seminar of seventeen students; it would be too easy to stand out and get called on.

Finally, a girl Buffy thought might be called Amelia said, “Well, he could mean that he wakes _in order_ to sleep. You know, like _I work to live_.”

“Interesting,” said Edwards. “That interpretation, or at least the example you used, would imply that waking isn’t the desired state. Sleep is the goal. Waking is just something the speaker has to do to get there. One must, after all, wake up if one is going to fall asleep again.”

“But it doesn’t have to be like that,” said Charlie, a young-looking blond boy with a round chubby face, who was also in Winslow’s Victorian Realist Fiction lecture. “It could be the opposite way around, or even that both of them are bad. Like, _We escaped from the monster just to fall victim to the dragon._ ”

“Well, I can tell what you read in your spare time,” said Edwards. Charlie ducked his head, embarrassed, and Buffy found herself mildly annoyed at Edwards for trying to score cool-guy points at the expense of a student. “But you’re absolutely right, that’s another interpretation. Or it could be that sleep is a state the speaker awakes into. As in, _I woke to the smell of bacon_. But okay, let’s open this up beyond the grammatical now. Wake and sleep.” He tapped the page in front of him. “Are these physical states, or are they symbolic?”

“Er,” said Charlie, who clearly wanted to redeem himself. Feeling bad for him, Buffy tried to lend him some confidence with an encouraging look. “Sleep is a common metaphor for death.”

“An old and venerable one,” agreed Edwards. “We all hear echoes of _Hamlet_ here, right? _To die, to sleep_ ,” he recited,

“ _To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;  
__For in that sleep of death what dreams may come_  
_When we have shuffled off this mortal coil  
__Must give us pause_.”

Buffy breathed. Set her pencil down on her notebook.

_What dreams may come. In that sleep of death._

“So perhaps Roethke’s sleep is that _undiscover’d country from whose bourn / No traveller returns_ ,” said Edwards, and Buffy almost laughed out loud. She’d never read _Hamlet_ , but even she knew that quote. She just hadn’t thought about it since high school.

 _No traveller_. Oh man, she thought, if only Willy Shakespeare knew.

Maybe it was better he didn’t. The shock would probably blow all his writing talent right out of his skull.

So warm, death. So warm she’d been, and so complete. And so loved. With her elbow on the table and her head bowed, Buffy raised a hand to her forehead, shielding her eyes from the fluorescent lights. Was that what she was? A traveller?

She didn’t feel like a traveller. She felt decidedly stationary.

“In that case,” Edwards said, “to _wake_ might mean to be born. Right, Charlie?” Red-faced from the attention, Charlie nodded. “Good! What else might Roethke mean by _wake_?”

Silence. Edwards let it go on for a few seconds, then looked around at all the students carefully avoiding his eyes. “Come on, people! _Light takes the Tree… The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair…_ What’s he referring to?” When still no one piped up, Edwards shook his head and sighed like Dawn used to when she was thirteen and desperate for Mom to know that her life was _tragically_ unfair.

“Enlightenment, people!” he said. “Can’t we read this poem as a journey of acceptance, a journey toward enlightenment? A process that can’t be rushed and can’t be planned out. A journey for which an active attempt to reach the destination actually _precludes_ achievement of it! _I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go._ It’s a _spiritual_ journey.”

Again, Edwards tapped the poem in front of him with a confident fingertip. “There’s a joy here, a peaceful acceptance. But this is a journey that meanders and circles back, one full of stops and missteps. That’s why what we’ve got here is a villanelle. Very structured, but with only two rhymes, and those two choruses that repeat, and repeat, and repeat. One step forward with one foot, one step back with the other. It’s a journey in a form that folds back on itself, and which proceeds, if it does proceed, slowly and according to its own logic. It cannot be forced or rushed.”

Maybe if he hadn’t made fun of Charlie and gotten Buffy a little annoyed to begin with, she wouldn’t have said anything. But now she was irritated with him, and she was thinking of how bright the lights were, how loud his voice. And she _hated_ his interpretation of the poem. It was like he was trying to turn a poem about a real experience and real feelings and anxieties into some grand metaphor. Make it abstract, philosophical and cold. It seemed like a kind of… a kind of violence.

Buffy knew violence. All the forms it took.

And before she was aware it was out of her own mouth, she’d said, “No.”

“No?” Edwards raised his eyebrows. “It’s Muffy, isn’t it? You disagree?”

“Buffy,” said Buffy coolly. “And yes, I disagree.”

“Please, go on.” Edwards gestured toward her with a generous, outstretched hand. “I’m curious to hear your thoughts. You so rarely venture them.” He smiled sweetly.

Oho. Buffy grinned to herself, shook her head a little. Okay, then. A fight.

His mistake. She could handle a fight.

“You’ve made the poem entirely about the mind,” she said, trying to get her thoughts in order quickly. “Or the… spirit, or whatever. But look how much there is of the _body_ in this poem. Sure, _I feel my fate_ and _I learn by going_ are kinda abstract. But he’s chosen to organize the poem around –” _organizing_ the poem around something was a concept she’d picked up from her peers in this class, and she relished deploying it now “– around waking and sleeping, which are things our bodies do, things they need.

“And look, here: _We think by feeling_. Thinking is something we do with our minds. _Feeling_ lives in our bodies. It’s what we do with our hearts. It’s, um – muscular. And, see, his being is _dancing_ , and _from ear to ear_ – he’s all _about_ the body, there. His feet are on the ground, he’s breathing the lively air, the light is hitting the tree, the worm is climbing the stairs. All of those are things that happen in the real world, the physical world. And he’s shaking,” concluded Buffy. “That’s a physical reaction.”

“To awe, perhaps,” said Edwards. “Religious awe, as one might achieve before a great truth. _Or enlightenment_.”

Buffy shrugged, uncomfortable. His arguments seemed reasonable. Perfectly plausible, in fact. And she didn’t really know how to read poetry, after all. But what Edwards was saying just sounded so _wrong_. “Probably you’re right,” she said. “Probably that’s what he’s after. But I just feel like… like we’re forgetting this whole aspect of the poem. It feels like there’s more than joy and acceptance, or whatever you said, in this. It kind of feels like there’s this element of… resignation, I guess? Like this guy can’t help where he’s going, so it’s no use being afraid of it, but in the meantime he’s in no rush to get there.”

“He’s taking his waking slow,” put in Amelia.

“Well, he’s kind of in a fog,” added Charlie. “ _Of those so close beside me, which are you?_ It’s like – er, he can’t see, his eyes are still closed. With – with sleep, maybe? His sleep is lingering. Physically, like you said. Kind of… taking over his body?”

Frowning, a girl named Emma, who always sat next to Amelia – she was very tall, with a horsey neck and beautiful clear grey eyes – said, “It’s true he does have all these unanswered questions, though.” Buffy didn’t think she’d ever heard Emma say anything before; she had a lovely, lilting, Scottish voice, but she spoke very quietly, looking down at her notebook. “ _What is there to know, which are you_ , _who can tell us how_. And those are all questions of the mind. Epistemological questions, really. Knowing about knowing, and all that. But…”

She trailed off for a moment, scanning the page, and everyone waited; no one interrupted her. “Yes, look! If we’re taking, er, Buffy’s –” she said Buffy’s name like a question, and looked up to wait for Buffy to nod at her before continuing – “Buffy’s interpretation, you can see it. Whenever he asks a question, there’s something physical after it. _What is there to know? / I hear my being dance from ear to ear._ And then _which are you? / … I shall walk softly there_ , and _who can tell us how / The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair_. It’s like the questions are all in the mind, but the answer is in the body. It all comes back to the body.”

“Exactly.” Buffy nodded, working it out as she went now. “It’s like – it’s like he’s _trapped_ ,” she realized. “He’s trapped in his fate, which is tied up with his body, because he’s going to die. He’s just, like, stuck. In his destiny, and in his life and, and, his body. Whenever he tries to jump ahead or change his path, he’s just… pulled back. And _that’s_ why it’s a villanelle. It repeats itself because these lines, these choruses – he’s talking about what’s inescapable.”

Life, death, fate, one’s own skin. All things she’d been pulled back into. Maybe Hamlet, for all his moaning, had never met anyone who’d really had a destiny. Those things dragged you around worse than any ghost of your dad. Ghosts weren’t so bad, really. Buffy remembered the only one she’d tangled with, that high school kid who’d killed the teacher he’d loved.

 _A person_ , he’d said, through her, _doesn’t just wake up and stop loving somebody._

She’d agreed with him, at the time. But there were all sorts of things she knew better now. All sorts of things she’d stopped believing in.

_A person doesn’t just wake up._

Edwards was looking decidedly unhappy about the turn the conversation had taken, but he seemed compelled to offer what evidence he could find to support this new theory. “Ah, it may be worth mentioning,” he said, “that many of the choruses are also _preceded_ by lines containing a physical action or reaction, most of which are not end-stopped with a period. Although –” he stressed the word – “they’re not enjambed, either.”

 _Enjambment_ , when one line went right into the next without any punctuation, was one of the only terms Buffy remembered from her class in Sunnydale. She didn’t know _end-stopped_ , but it sounded like the opposite. Since everyone else was nodding sagely, Buffy was afraid to ask.

“Er – sorry,” said Charlie. “It’s just – I’m just looking at _I shall walk softly there_?” Edwards nodded at him to go on. “It’s one of the only times the speaker makes a real choice about something. Well – well that and the taking his waking slow. Even when his being is dancing, he’s only hearing it. It’s like he’s only an observer of what’s happening to him.”

“Yeah, you’re right!” said Buffy. “That goes with learning by going where he has to go. It’s like he’s… caught up in this big current, and he’s losing things along the way. People even. They stay with him, in a way, nearby. But they’re inaccessible, like – they’re on the other side of a wall? And it’s sad, and… and nothing is really in his control.”

“Not even where he’s heading,” Amelia pointed out. “Especially because he can’t really see.”

“Maybe he’s heading toward enlightenment,” Buffy said, slowly. “But maybe he doesn’t care all that much. Because that waking up, that’s not the only thing worth wanting. ’Cause _waking_ is enlightenment, at least according to your metaphor, but –” she turned to Amelia now – “like you pointed out, it seems like it’s the sleep that he wants. Not the waking.”

This speaker, she didn’t say, seems like a guy who doesn’t want to wake up. She could tell, because she’d been someone like that. Someone who longed for that sleep of death, and what dreams may come there.

It wasn’t something she was going to say out loud.

 _Maybe it’s not the_ country _no traveller returns from_ , she thought. _Maybe it’s the dreams._

_Maybe they just don’t want to come back._

\+ + +

“You told him he was _wrong_?” Willow asked, tugging her sunglasses down her nose so she could see Buffy more clearly. “You? Told a prof. That he was wrong.”

“Yep,” said Buffy, slurping up the last of her vanilla frappuccino. Since the clouds had briefly cleared, resulting in a surprisingly nice afternoon, they had decided to brave the chill and sit outside on the street.

“Wow. What did he say?”

Buffy leaned across the table, looking up and down the street out of habit, to make sure that no slayers or classmates happened to be walking by. “Well, after class – you know, when he wouldn’t look like an idiot in front of the class, I guess – he came up to me and asked if I always had such good ideas and never said anything, or if it was just Roethke. And then he invited me to have coffee. To talk more, he said.”

“In, like, a normal professor-student-intellectual-conversation way, or in a sketchy you’re-super-hot-and-let’s- _talk_ -talk way?”

“Mm,” Buffy considered. “Minorly sketchy. But only minorly.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him yes,” said Buffy. “ _Obviously_. What?” she added defensively. “I’m going to stay on his good side until I get my final grade back! I don’t have to, like, date him. Just hold him off with coffees for a month.”

“Oh,” said Willow. “Good point, I guess.”

Even with the sun – probably the last of it for the season – Buffy was cold. She started wishing she’d ordered a mocha or a latte. Something toasty.

Willow perked up a bit. “But hey! Sounds like you’re really liking school. Or this class, anyway.”

“Yeah,” said Buffy, surprising herself. “Yeah, you know, I really am.”

“Good! That’s good.” But Willow was frowning. “Buffy…”

“What’s wrong?” asked Buffy suspiciously. “Is it Kennedy? If it’s Kennedy, I’m going to kill her.”

“No! No, it’s not Kennedy. Me and Kennedy, we’re – it’s good. Well, she spends most of her time at Slayer Central, so there isn’t much there to be _not_ good, but. Everything is fine.”

“You just say the word, buster.”

“You know it.” Willow gave her a weak smile. “It’s just – are you okay? I know you were a little… I mean, after Sunnydale. But I thought you were getting better.”

“I was,” said Buffy. “I mean, I am. Better. All better.”

But nothing could stop Willow when she was in concerned mode. It was like trying to deprogram a robot while it attacked you. “You’ve just… I mean, I know you’ve been worried and patrolling a lot, but you just seem – more distant. Distracted.”

Willow was her best friend. Buffy _longed_ to tell her about the two dreams. Willow would say all the right things. She’d comfort her. And if she told Giles about it, she’d be careful not to let Buffy find out that they’d been talking about her behind her back, which was about as much as Buffy could expect these days.

But as she opened her mouth spill the beans, Buffy found that she couldn’t. She couldn’t face it. The words she’d need wouldn’t come. They felt all jammed down inside her chest somewhere, a bolus that hurt when she slept and walked and breathed.

“No,” said Buffy. “Thanks, Will. Really. But there’s nothing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Other than the epigraph (Theodore Roethke, "The Motion"), this one's pretty light on reference material. Quotes from "The Waking," obviously, and _Hamlet_ ; and a line of dialogue from 2x19, "I Only Have Eyes for You."


	5. Chapter 5

_The edge of heaven was sharper than a sword_

\+ + +

“All right!” yelled Kennedy over the hubbub. “If your birthday is June or earlier, you’re with me. July or later, with Buffy.”

There were a few chaotic moments while the girls sorted themselves out. When the dust settled, there were five girls standing near Kennedy. Twenty-seven grouped themselves around Buffy.

“ _Seriously_?” asked Kennedy. “Look, I have everyone’s file. If I find out that you’re lying to avoid me, you’re on kitchen duty for the next month. No exceptions.”

“Statistically,” one tall, lithe girl piped up, “July through early October are overrepresented in terms of birthdays. January is significantly underrepresented.”

Kennedy rubbed her forehead with the inside of her wrist. “Just – if you’re born on an even day, with me. Odd, with Buffy.”

Which was how Buffy ended up leading fifteen whispering slayers, giggling like they were kids allowed to stay up on New Year’s, through a damp graveyard on the outskirts of London. The weather was turning again; a cold breeze whipped up the branches overhead, and the air felt thick and full of water. Through the humid gloom, the distant streetlights wore haloes.

Buffy shivered, trying to hear movement, the crack of a twig or the sigh of grass, over the hushed gossiping behind her. It was useless. Had the trainees in Sunnydale ever been this flighty? When she’d taken them out on patrol with Spike, Buffy remembered them being deadly serious. Also scared. But then, most of them had had to flee for their lives just to get to Sunnydale. They knew what it meant to have something to fear. These girls with her now hadn’t even seen a vampire before.

Out of the corner of her eye, Buffy saw a thickening of the tree-shadows keeping pace with them, and smiled thinly. Time for a lesson.

Turning her back to the shadow, Buffy faced the girls and rapped out, “Quiet! I don’t want to hear another sound. Do you realize how big a target you’re making of yourselves?”

“We can handle it,” an Asian girl with long black hair said confidently.

“Yeah,” added another. “There’s so many of us.”

“How many who’ve fought a vampire before? How many who’ve _seen_ one?” There was awkward silence. Buffy took advantage of it to listen beneath the wind. “On patrol, you’re the hunters, but you can also be prey. It happens in an instant. _Act_ like it. Every time you come out here, you could die. Do you understand that?”

One girl raised a hand partway. “Uh –”

Buffy cut her off with a glare. “I said I didn’t want to hear another sound. This isn’t the training gym. No one is going to step in and save you when things get hairy.”

“Er, Buffy?” That was Miri, who’d been quiet up until now.

“ _Shut it_.”

“But,” said Miri, shaking but stubborn, “there’s something –”

“Watch out!” yelled another, and a third screamed.

“What?” asked Buffy calmly. “You mean him?” and she spun, and pulled a back round-off from a standstill, kicking hard at the vampire three paces behind her. He went down with a _whump_ of air from his useless lungs.

“You’re up!” she yelled to the fifteen shocked faces around her, just as the vampire flipped upright with a snarl.

It was extremely messy and several of the girls would have bad bruises in the morning. They really only succeeded through strength of numbers: if the vampire rushed at one of them, she could evade while the others distracted him. Still, Buffy remembered her first fight – how scared she’d been, how close she’d come to dying – and cut them a little slack.

For that. Not for their other mistake.

As they stood around over the pile of dust, slapping each other’s backs and laughing breathlessly with relief, she gasped out, “Good job. One problem.”

Only when they turned around to look did she snap the neck of the female vampire who’d been struggling in her chokehold. In the silence after the nauseating crack, Buffy finished her off with a quick stake to the heart. Arms crossed over her chest, she surveyed the girls.

“Vampires run in packs. You know that. In fact, it’s the very first thing you learned. So you know what you are now?”

They weren’t laughing any more, and Buffy wasn’t joking around. She found, a little surprised, that she was furious.

“Not a rhetorical question,” she snapped.

Miri swallowed visibly. “Dead.”

Buffy nodded. “Dead. You got too focused on the fight and forgot –” She’d been about to say, _that there’s many of them, and only one of you_. That wasn’t true, not anymore. It was why Kennedy was teaching them – Kennedy who’d always had fellow slayers to rely on, a different method of fighting. Or one of the reasons why.

Instead, she finished, “– forgot to watch your surroundings. Forgot your earliest lesson.” She let the awkward silence unspool for a minute, then shook her head. “Come on. We’re going back.”

“What?” yelped one girl. “We’ve only been out here half an hour!” There were murmurs of agreement and whispers about the unfairness of it all. The complaints had a slightly desperate undertone. No one wanted to go back to life under hard-ass Kennedy, especially not as failures.

“I’m not going to be out here with you all any longer,” Buffy said, forcing herself to remain unmoved. The lesson had to stick. With any luck, they’d run into a third vampire on their way out, she could pretend to relent, and the girls would get a chance to redeem themselves. “You’re a liability, do you understand that? To each other, _and_ to me. I’ve spent a lot of time surviving. I know when to get myself out of a dangerous situation.”

She led her ragtag, chastened slayers in a mopey line back toward the road through a wind rising in uneven gusts. A few raindrops splattered onto her canvas jacket, soaking in almost immediately. Buffy sighed, making a note to herself to get a rain-proof jacket for patrols, no matter how unfashionable they looked. Maybe Burberry made a wool-lined trench coat that would allow her legs sufficient range of motion. She could ask Giles for it as a present for her next nine birthdays.

Within minutes, the rain had thickened to an absolute downpour. In Sunnydale, weather like this would have kept vampires in their nests, but here in London, the old brick sewer systems and ancient tunnels they preferred as hidey-holes tended to flood in heavy rain, driving all manner of demons to the surface like rodents. If the rain kept up, she’d have to drop the slayers off and stay out all night. Maybe she could grab a poncho or something at Slayer Central.

Her thoughts already far ahead of her feet, Buffy only half-noticed the strange blue shimmer in the air between the gravestones ahead. She raised a hand. “Hold up.”

 _Blue_ wasn’t quite the right word. It was like a billowing translucent veil, a sort of thickening and brightening at the same time. Buffy narrowed her eyes at it through the driving rain, confused. Just as she took half a step forward, a demon stepped out of the shimmering air, landing heavily in the mud.

It was enormous: seven feet tall, and built like an oak tree – if oak trees had shoulders the width of cast-iron safes. Set deep into the reptilian skin of its forehead were granite-like horns, with gouges all over them. Damage from a male mating ritual? Buffy thought, a little wildly. Maybe they clashed horns like mountain rams.

The flesh of the demon’s right arm ended at the elbow. The rest of its arm consisted of an enormous, bone-coloured blade with a pin-sharp point, curved as cruelly as Captain Hook’s bad hand. Two rows of saw-like teeth marched along the blade’s outside edge; the smooth inside edge was knife-sharp. It was not exactly the most reassuring thing Buffy had ever seen.

She took stock of the terrain. The rain was coming down in buckets. In a few minutes, the ground would be soup. If she were by herself, she’d work to maintain some escape routes to higher ground, places to run and turn. With all these girls, though, she didn’t want to be outflanked, not when she wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on them all. Better to limit the possible approaches. Captain Hook turned his thick nose to the wind and snuffed wetly.

“Back,” Buffy said quietly. “Gravel path. Backs to the mausoleum.” It was more wooded around there, but that couldn’t be helped. “Then form up. Rely on each other.”

A second demon stepped out beside the first and locked its yellow gaze on her.

“Move _now_ ,” yelled Buffy, and rushed forward to engage.

The things had skin like _rock_. Buffy wasn’t armed for this. All she had were a few stakes. She ducked and rolled, coming up drenched with gloppy mud. Whatever these things were – and she’d never seen anything like them – they were fast, but not particularly agile. Turn, then. Turn and dodge. On her next spin, Buffy swore. Three more demons had just appeared out of the air.

Buffy let two of them close on her, back and front, then dove out of the way and let one swipe the other through the chest with its bone-hook. With its momentum carrying it forward, the demon who’d struck the blow was half-bent. Buffy leaped up on its back, wishing, somewhat pointlessly, for an axe. Since she was stuck with what she had, she tried to get a grip around the demon’s neck. But it was smarter than it looked: it just thrust itself backward into a monument, crushing her against crumbling stone. Wheezing, Buffy clung on. Water coursed down her face, bubbled in her mouth. Hair clung to her cheek.

“Here!” she heard, and looked up to see Miri toss a sword through the air. Not an axe, but it would do. One-handed, still clinging to the demon’s trunk-thick neck, Buffy caught the hilt, then gripped the end of the blade – it sliced deep into her palm; no help for it – and let her own weight pull it through the demon’s neck.

Even as it fell, another two demons stepped through the veil of air. One raised its hook to its horn, sliding the smooth, honed inside curve along it. Sparks jetted out in a line, hissing in the rain.

“I told you to retreat!” she called to Miri, who was organizing a few of the girls to take on another demon.

“Fat chance!” yelled Miri. She’d directed two of the girls to hang onto the demon’s upper arm above the hook so it couldn’t slash at her, while she hacked at its hook with a long dagger. “Ugh, this thing’s like solid rock!”

Buffy hurled the sword back to her. “Just cut the whole arm off!”

“Oh,” said Miri, catching the sword. “Right.” Apparently, the demon’s flesh and bone cut easier than its hook. Without it, the thing was weaponless, if big, and the three girls managed to impale it with the sword after only a little struggle. Buffy was busy engaging three of the other four demons, which had converged on her as the closest target. The last was heading toward the twelve remaining girls, who were all ranged grimly in fighting stances on the gravel.

“We have to close the portal!” Buffy yelled from the grip of one of the demons; another was closing on her from the front.

The demon ensnaring her had its left arm hooked around her stomach, holding her tight against its chest – which meant, Buffy realized, that she was too close to its body for it to reach her with its unbendable weapon. Hanging on its forearm, she raised her legs off the ground, kicked out, and ran her feet up the torso of the demon in front of her, clipping it under the chin. Roaring, it fell back.

“On it!” yelled Miri.

A quick glance told Buffy that the twelve slayers were using Miri’s strategy against their demon. As she watched, it tossed two girls off its arm. They flew hard into a tree and a gravestone, respectively; but both picked themselves up again, and three more slayers had taken their place in the meantime. The demon was falling under the weight of numbers.

But she’d taken her eye off her opponents for a second too long. Only a desperate, belly-aching lift of her legs saved her ribcage from being sliced open like a hanging pig’s under a butcher’s muscular cleaver. Instead, a double-edged toothy hook appeared from her right flank and dragged deep into her outer thigh, flensing a long, neat strip of flesh out of the muscle.

Breathless, Buffy could only gasp: it hurt too much to scream. For a moment, her vision whited out. Desperate, she bore down on her body until her eyes mostly cleared and only the edges of her vision were still black. If she passed out now, she would die, and so would all fifteen of the girls. Lights popped in the corners of her eyes. Groaning, she reached up with one hand and jabbed her thumb backward into the face of the demon holding her until she found its eye. When it dropped her on her leg, she almost passed out again.

Limping, she made her way to the demon Miri and her friends had killed and, with a heave of effort, lifted its severed hook. “Miri!” she yelled. “Portal?”

“I have no idea!” Miri called back, sounding desperate. “Nothing’s working. No, wait – it’s – it’s…” Miri trailed off and Buffy spared a quick glance over.

Something weird was happening to the veil of shimmering air. It was vibrating all over and going out of focus – not out of focus of Buffy’s eyes, which still weren’t entirely reliable, but out of focus of _everything_. Something about it no longer seemed to belong in the world, like its edges didn’t quite line up with the edges of the air around it. The effect was collage-like – as if someone had cut a picture out of a newspaper and pasted it onto a magazine.

And then, as Buffy watched, it disappeared.

“– gone?” finished Miri. “Why’s it gone?”

“Later!” gasped Buffy, who was now sword-fighting a demon with the severed hook. “I’ve got other problems right now.” Now that she was back on firmer ground and properly armed – the hook was heavy and awkward, but hideously sharp – Buffy was better able to take on the three remaining demons, even with an injured leg. Suddenly the fight felt winnable.

A few more minutes and it was over. In the silence after battle, the rain sounded like a roar. Buffy stood over the last demon, gasping, exhausted.

A sound brought her back, making her turn. One of the girls was being sick in the grass. Most of the rest of them were standing around, shivering. She’d have to get them moving – in this rain, shock would be a killer. They gaped, ash-pale and horrified. Even Buffy had to admit that it hadn’t been the introductory fight she’d intended.

“What the bloody ’ell was that?” one girl asked, a thin edge of hysteria to her voice.

“That,” said Buffy grimly, “is what it feels like to be prey.”

\+ + + 

Buffy watched the door to the slayer facility swing shut behind the last of the bedraggled girls before she let herself turn toward home. She’d tied her jacket tight around her thigh, but she could tell from the unpleasant squish of the soaked sock in her right boot that the gash had bled through. Heat surged over her skin whenever she stepped with her right foot; she tried an awkward shuffle instead, too focused on trying to minimize the bleeding to notice whether everyone else on the sidewalk was giving her weird looks.

When she finally reached the front door, dizzy, soaked, swallowing sickly, she had to rest a hand on its painted wood to steady herself. It still took four tries to line up the key. She was shivering with cold and shock and blood loss. She’d left a red handprint on the door, a smear from the middle to the edge. In the foyer she kicked up the rug so she wouldn’t drip mud and blood and rainwater all over it, and swayed in the aftermath, gathering her strength. Her bedroom was a pipe dream, but she could probably reach the downstairs bathroom. Maybe.

On her first try she stumbled, knocking into the umbrella stand before she caught herself on the wall. Four black umbrellas, a polka-dotted one, a red one from Giles’s bank, and Pat’s formal hardwood cane clattered across the hardwood. Buffy bit down on a groan, surveying the damage. She had no doubt she’d be able to kneel down to gather them. It was the getting up again that was unlikely.

Footsteps on the stairs. Buffy looked up through the dark and saw the smear of Giles’s nervous face, something long and solid in his hands. As he leaned it against the railing, Buffy recognized it as one of the rowing oars that hung, crossed, behind the desk in his study.

“Buffy,” he breathed, and hurried down to her.

“’M fine,” she said into his shoulder, letting her head loll against him as he propped her up with one strong arm around her back. “Just need some gauze. And sleep. ’M fine.” For an old-guy librarian, Giles was pretty solid. He half-lifted her with ease and helped her stumble along to the bathroom.

“Of course you are,” he said. “And the slayers?”

“Bumps. Bruises.”

As they passed the base of the stairs, Willow’s quavering voice ventured from the landing, “Hello?”

“Whoever you are, I’ve got a limited-edition replica of Mace Windu’s lightsaber,” Xander added, “and I’m not afraid to use it!”

Buffy heard their voices fuzzily, staticky at the edges. It matched how everything looked in the dark.

“For goodness’ sake, Xander,” snapped Giles, though his arm remained firm around Buffy and his strained voice was quiet, “put that useless thing down. Willow, the first aid kit, if you please.”

God, the hallway was so warm. It would be heavenly if she didn’t feel so nauseous.

“Giles…”

“Almost there, Buffy. Here we go. Can you lean here for a moment?” He set her against the bathroom wall like she was another oar. The bright room gleamed white and black and copper, swimming toward her through the dark. With quick movements, Giles rolled up the rug into a bolster and laid towels over the tile floor to cushion the chill, then eased her down onto them, with the rolled rug for a pillow.

Some indistinct noise announced Willow’s arrival. Murmurs. Buffy felt her boots being pulled off, the left one first. Then the right. She couldn’t help a gasp of pain.

“Sorry, sorry!” Xander. “Jeez, Buff, what was it, a scimitar?”

“Captain Hook,” she muttered.

“The storybook villain?” asked Giles, his face appearing above hers. The movement made her dizzier. She shut her eyes, which didn’t help. The world swooped incessantly past her eyelids.

“Maybe if he were a demon,” she said. “His hook was about four feet long end to end. Also it had teeth.”

“ _Teeth_?” asked Willow.

“Yep.” Buffy grimaced as someone tried to loosen the knot she’d tied right over the gash. “On the outer side of the curve. Like shark teeth. Two rows. The inside was just a sharp blade.”

“Scimitar,” repeated Xander triumphantly.

“Looked like they hone them on their horns.”

“Hm, doesn’t sound familiar,” mused Giles, as Xander squeaked, “‘ _They_ ’?”

But whoever it was had succeeded in untying the knot, releasing a flood of pain and hot blood, and the floor and the towels and the light and the room all turned to butterfly dust and rose up in a cloud like ash, and she sank deep into it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epigraph from Theodore Roethke's "The Tranced."


	6. Chapter 6

_Beyond the cheat of Time, here where you died, you live;  
_ _You pace the garden walk, secure and sensitive;_  
_You linger on the stair: Love’s lonely pulses leap!  
_ _The harpsichord is shaken, the dogs look up from sleep._

\+ + +

Late afternoon in Sunnydale. She could tell by the golden quality of the light streaming through her window. The air was quiet. Dust motes sugared the sunbeams. Buffy lay in her bed on Revello Drive in a state of half-dreaming, more peaceful than confused, and very tired. Her head felt like it had been emptied and stuffed with cotton, with no memories floating around inside to trouble it.

Finally she tried to sit up, and gasped. Her leg hurt fiercely, throbbing with every heartbeat. Gingerly, she rested a hand on her thigh – her right hand, because the palm of the left one was smothered in gauze – and felt the shape of bandages under her sweatpants, wrapped tight, which explained the throbbing. Buffy groaned and let herself flop back down with an arm over her eyes.

In the kitchen, there was the sound of a glass breaking.

Buffy’s heart stuttered. Still in a fog, she called, “Mom? Dawn?”

Footsteps, fast ones, on the stairs. “Mom?” she called again, but quieter this time, because the gait was wrong, and then Spike appeared in the doorway.

“No, love,” he said, gently. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Buffy struggled upright again and, helpless, held out her one good hand toward him. Hesitantly, he took three steps forward and grasped it. His hand was sun-warm.

“Hello,” he said. There was a tightness in his face, something suppressed that had been let out across the tiny muscles that moved chin and cheek and jaw. “Been a while, this time.”

She smiled at him, sadly. “I’m dreaming again,” she said.

“No.” He sat carefully next to her on the bed. She liked the feel of his hand, the dry rough skin over his knuckles. “No. This isn’t a dream, Buffy. Don’t know what it is, but it’s not a dream.”

“You’re dead. Sunnydale is gone.”

“I _know_ ,” he said, and he sounded frustrated. “I know that, don’t I? I was there. But – then I was here. And sometimes you are too. But I’m here even when you aren’t. Been here for a long time.”

Buffy frowned. Maybe weird dreams were a normal side effect of being wounded by a Captain Hook demon’s scimitar-shark-hand. “How long?”

“Months,” said dream-Spike. He looked out the window. Sun wrapped around the angles of his face, lighting up his delicate pale ear as if from the inside. Fascinated, Buffy stared at the tiny capillaries under his skin, a tracery she’d never have seen in life. His backlit hair glowed white and sharp at the edges, like the line of haze along a summer horizon.

He turned his head, and the play of light along his cheekbone was so beautiful Buffy wanted to cry. “You don’t believe me,” he said.

With her free hand, Buffy traced that glowing curve of his ear, and his eyes fluttered closed. “No,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because I miss you too much.”

The room was so silent. There was no wind outside, no sound at all. Together they listened to the sun sinking in the sky, a far-distant celestial music, and to the atomic tinkling of dust motes stirred by their breath.

After a few minutes, Spike said, “You’re still here. Haven’t woken up yet?”

“I must be tired. Healing.”

He nodded his chin at the bandages hidden under her sweatpants. “What happened?”

She should’ve guessed he’d be able to tell. Smell it, maybe. She told him about patrol, the slayers, the rain, the veil, the demons, the fight.

“Do you know what they are? Giles said they didn’t sound familiar. The gang is probably researching right now.”

“Don’t sound like any demon I’ve heard of,” Spike said.

“That’s weird,” Buffy said through a frown. He shrugged. “Isn’t it?”

“’M not an expert,” he protested. “ ’Sides, I’m a dream, aren’t I?” He said it bitterly. “Can’t know more’n you do. Just a dream.”

“My dream,” she agreed. “ _My_ dream.”

“Tell me something,” he said, desperately. “Tell me anything. Tell me about your life.”

So she talked about the Watcher house, and school, and the argument with Edwards about Roethke. She told him about Xander and Willow and Dawn, and Giles’s study, and the slayers and London and the rowan tree outside her window, until her leg became even more painful and Spike’s face more distant and he grabbed at her, hands on either side of her skull, the balls of his thumbs pressed hard against the hinge of her jaw and his eyes looking frantically into hers.

“Come back to me,” he said. “Buffy,” and she raised her own hands to his wrists and clung.

“Yes,” she said, “yes,”

and woke up on Saturday afternoon to Willow and Dawn playing Go Fish on her fluffy white bedroom rug while the rain came down outside.

“Buffy?” asked Dawn, scrambling up. On her head she was wearing a shapeless, violently purple mass with a lopsided yellow pom-pom on top, which, after a long, bewildered moment, Buffy recognized as a hat. Must have been a gift from Willow. “You okay?”

“Why’s the window closed?” Buffy muttered. Her throat was packed with gravel.

Confused, Dawn said, “It’s gross out. And cold.” She put an unconscious hand to her knitted hat.

“Please. Open it a crack,” Buffy rasped. Willow was holding a hand several inches above a cold mug of tea on the nightstand, murmuring a few words. After a moment, she passed it, newly steaming, to Buffy and helped her wrap her hands around it. Buffy blew on its surface and looked back at her sister. “Please?”

“Sure, okay,” said Dawn, who seemed too worried to be argumentative.

When the thinnest stream of cold, wet air was seeping over her face, and she’d had two soothing sips of honeyed tea, Buffy whispered, “Thanks,” and set down the mug, and closed her eyes, and wished once more for sleep.

\+ + +

She woke again in time for dinner, although she didn’t have much appetite. Even Slayer healing couldn’t make a whole lot of headway in a single day against a strip of flesh being pulled out of her leg. Giles told her the gash went down to the bone. Neither of them said the words _femoral artery_ or _close call_ , but before he stood up from her bed to let her get dressed for dinner, he cradled the back of her neck, pulled her hard into his shoulder, and kissed the top of her head, laying his cheek against her hair for a long moment while they both listened to the sound of rain on the rowan.

After dinner, after Dawn and Willow had cleared and wiped the table and sat back down at it with serious faces, Buffy told the whole story.

“We’ve been researching all day,” said Dawn. “No one’s heard of these things. Nothing even close.”

Giles cleared his throat. “When we couldn’t make any progress here, Willow and I returned to the cemetery. The bodies were gone, but I found the… hook, as you called it. I can’t identify the material. It isn’t bone or antler.”

Buffy shook her head. “It’s stronger,” she said. “A sword could cut through their bones fine, but it didn’t make a dent on that thing.”

“I linked with the coven,” Willow said. “When I was there. To try to track the portal you saw?”

“Yeah?”

“All we could find out was that it had connected to a foreign dimension. Some mystical energy came through,” she explained. “There were still… floaty bits around.”

“Wait, so someone _summoned_ these things?” Xander asked.

Giles nodded. “And I think at this point we have to assume they’ll try again.”

“Hey,” said Dawn. “Hey, hey!”

“Na na na na, goodbye?” Buffy tried.

A withering glare, she decided, was an art that could only be taken to its most perfect incarnation by a teenager. “What if,” said Dawn, while maintaining her glare in Buffy’s direction, “someone’s also been summoning demons from all over the world, and that’s why we’ve been seeing so many weird ones around?”

“Then they’re pretty bad at it,” said Buffy. “Didn’t you say those two mountain demons I saw the other day are totally harmless?”

“Maybe that’s why they’ve upgraded to an inter-dimensional calling device,” suggested Xander.

Giles took off his glasses and rubbed his brow with his thumb knuckle. “I wish the Council’s library had survived. It’s taking too long to research every demon we don’t recognize.”

Xander snapped his fingers. “Much as I hate to say it, you know who’d be useful?” There was an inelegant thump from under the table, which Buffy assumed was Willow’s foot on Xander’s shin, and a muffled whine escaped his throat. He squeaked, “Never mind.”

Buffy looked down at the table, where her hands were lying motionless against the wood. One wrapped in gauze. One that still remembered what it felt like to be on fire.

All hands, she thought, had a default position, a most natural pose. Some people’s hands knew how to wrap around a bottle; some were happiest in the soil, turning seed; some made things, or shaped words with a pencil, or cradled a face, or plucked a string. The body knew what to do. It knew where to go.

These hands, her hands? They killed. That was what they knew how to do.

Her hands. What she’d done with them.

“Spike,” she said. “Spike would be helpful.”

Apologetically, Giles said, “He did know a lot about demon identification. He even spoke several demon languages.”

“Fyarl,” Dawn agreed. “Also Silyak – you know, those ice demons? And four more. Oh, and French.”

“I didn’t know he spoke French,” said Buffy, quietly, to her hands. “He never told me that.”

There was an awkward silence that no one seemed to know how to break. None of them, Buffy thought, knew what to say to her. With something that felt surprisingly like wisdom, she realized that it wasn’t because they didn’t know her well enough. It was because they loved her so much that they couldn’t bear to say the wrong thing.

It should have made her happy, but instead Buffy felt a sense of loss at her own maturity, or maybe at the need for it.

What was the line? _The art of losing isn’t hard to master_.

That poet – Buffy had forgotten her name – she was right. Losing stuff was easy.

But if you really were a master at it, it wouldn’t hurt so much. It wouldn’t hurt at all.

\+ + +

Even before she was fully healed, Buffy started taking the slayers out on patrol again. She didn’t want to – a patrol with trainees was never satisfying, and the extra attention needed to mind them in a fight was exhausting to the point of debilitation – but, as she told Giles when he protested her early start, they desperately needed the experience.

“They had no idea what a real fight was like, Giles,” she told him. “They have to get used to it. I’ll break them into two groups and rotate taking them out.”

One advantage of knowing her as long as he had – an advantage for Buffy, anyway – was that Giles had finally figured out when he was beaten and, on those occasions, he was sometimes willing to skip the debate. “Well,” he sighed, “what they need is to adjust to fighting in small units. It’s how they’ll manage once they’re finished training. Take out just a few at a time. It’ll be easier on you, at any rate.”

So she did – three, sometimes four, five at the most. They had plenty of work: new demons were appearing thick and fast. Willow and the coven were trying to back-trace their origins to find whoever had summoned them, but the portals were unstable and disappeared too fast.

With the slayers along, Buffy couldn’t cover nearly as much ground as she could on her own. It meant that, every night, she’d drop the trainees off at Slayer Central in the small hours and go back out by herself until daylight. During the day, she slept longer, and more often.

If it was because, more often than not, she was dreaming herself into Sunnydale, and all those dreams seemed to feature Spike, she tried not to think about it.

People were noticing, she knew. Giles looked at her with a perpetual worried frown, and Willow tried to get her to go out to coffee, and Xander’s determinedly cheerful jokes got progressively worse and took on a frenetic edge. The sleep she did get wasn’t enough. Her thigh wound – maybe because of lack of sleep, maybe because she insisted on fighting on it every night – stubbornly refused to heal. At least her palm had knitted back up, though the new skin on it was dry and itchy and inclined to crack open.

The schedule was affecting her classwork, too. Buffy knew her professors had noticed that she hadn’t done the reading and couldn’t offer any thoughts when called on. And a little over two weeks after the fight with the Captain Hook demons, she jerked awake at the end of her Victorian Realist Fiction lecture to the usual shuffle of people leaving and rucksacks being zipped up, and heard Winslow call out, “Don’t forget, final papers due in three weeks! You should have your topics already. If you’re struggling to find one, come see me.”

Muzzy and sore, Buffy realized she’d missed the entire lecture. She remembered sitting down, writing _Middlemarch_ at the top of her notebook page, and then – nothing. And she didn’t have a topic for _any_ of her final papers. Groaning, Buffy buried her head in her arms on the desk and thought about just going right back to sleep. “Shit,” she said into her notebook.

“Er, sorry,” said a voice behind her. It was Charlie, blushing. “I, er, couldn’t help but notice that you… you were rather –”

“Asleep?” Buffy grumped. She groaned again. “Yep. Missed the whole thing.”

“It’s just – would you like my notes?” Charlie waved his notebook awkwardly and Buffy saw that he had written his notes with an emerald-green fountain pen, in the most gorgeous calligraphy she’d ever seen. Loops and swirls pirouetted off his capital letters, and the descenders on his “g”s and “j”s looked like something out of a tenth-century illuminated Quran. “I could scan them and email them to you.”

“Would you?” asked Buffy, feeling like something might finally be getting better. “That would be _amazing_. It’s really sweet of you to offer.”

“No problem,” said Charlie. “Erm, Buffy… It’s not any of my business, honestly, but – are you all right? I know it can be difficult, this time of year, and you being so far from home…”

Buffy dredged up a smile for him. “Yeah,” she said. “I’ve just got some – some stuff going on. And I’ve been… sick. Recovering.”

“It’s the damp,” said Charlie apologetically. Outside the lecture hall windows, the rain had returned, coming down steadily. “Flu goes around something awful late November. But if there’s anything I can do – if you want to, to talk or anything…”

Buffy couldn’t help but melt a little at how honestly and guilelessly worried he seemed for her. “Thanks, Charlie,” she said, sincerely. “Really. But I’ll survive. I always do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's epigraph comes from "[The Light of the House](https://poets.org/poem/light-house)," by Louise Imogen Guiney, which is also the source of the fic's title.
> 
> For those who, like Buffy, may have (understandably) forgotten who wrote "One Art" ("The art of losing isn't hard to master"), it's Elizabeth Bishop.


	7. Chapter 7

_How can I dream except beyond this life?_

\+ + +

That night, Buffy gathered her materials for all her classes and spread them out on the kitchen table alongside printouts of the prompts for her final papers. None of the papers, thankfully, had to be terribly long, and she’d done most of her homework for most of the term. She could pull this together. She could.

Willow found her, two and a half hours later, making a colour-coded study schedule. “No patrol?”

“I asked Kennedy to cover,” said Buffy without looking up. “Just for tonight. I gotta get back on track with my school stuff.”

“Don’t you think all this might be a bit… overboard?” Willow asked worriedly as she watched Buffy outline all her patrolling blocks in dark red marker.

“I learned it from you!” Buffy said brightly. Maybe a little too brightly. Carefully, she pushed her third cup of coffee a little farther away. A stack of knitted coasters had appeared on the table overnight, all different colours, with decorative loopy holes in them. Buffy had commandeered the emerald one for her mug. “Look here, see? I’m taking the next three days to plan, write, and revise my first paper, three days for the second – both of those are short – and four days for Victorian Realist Fiction, since I might have to do some research for that one. I’m going to write it on the use of geometric metaphor and its relation to female character in _Middlemarch_.”

“Sounds… fascinating?”

“And that leaves me, um, a week and a half for the last one.”

“Why so long?” asked Willow, who was looking somewhat concerned that Buffy was now shading in her allotted six hours of sleep per night in blue coloured pencil. “Do they want a whole dissertation?”

“I don’t have a topic yet,” Buffy admitted. “And there’s a lot of reading. Edwards wants us to pick a poet, read their entire collected works, and write three thousand words investigating their _oeuvre_ as a whole. That’s the word he used, _oeuvre_. Out _loud_.”

Willow wrinkled her nose. “Eesh. Talk about an asshole.”

“Yeah, but I have to have coffee with him tomorrow anyway,” said Buffy. “I’ve already cancelled once.”

“Ooh, talk to him about how much you love shopping in London,” Willow suggested. “His eyes’ll glaze right over.”

“That’s _brilliant_ , Will!”

“Patented trick for getting rid of men. Trust me,” she said, “I’m a pro. Around me – men, they head straight for the hills. It’s perfect.” She fiddled with one of Buffy’s coloured pens. “You, ah, going to bed soon?”

“In a few. Just want to make a few notes for my paper on Chaucer,” said Buffy through a yawn. She guessed the coffee wasn’t working quite as well as she’d thought. “I’ll be up within the hour. I promise, Mom.” She offered a tired but genuine smile through her eye-roll so that Willow would know she was teasing.

Once Willow’s tread was audible on the stairs, Buffy pulled out her _Canterbury Tales_ for a re-read of the prologue. There were a few quotations she wanted to hunt down, and as long as she was all set up here…

“Dammit,” she said upon opening her eyes in the UC Sunnydale main library.

“That disappointed to see me, are you?” came an amused voice from the stacks behind her.

Buffy was grinning before she’d even turned around. “Never,” she said. “What are you doing _here_?”

“What, a bloke can’t read?” He was leaning against a bookshelf, holding a book casually as if he’d been flipping through it. Two more were under his arm. High above, the many-paned windows let sunlight stream down through the dust to strike Mondrian squares on the carpet. “’M surprised you even recognize the place, to be honest. Don’t think I ever saw you set a toe in this building.”

“I went!” protested Buffy. “…Once.”

“Durin’ orientation week?”

Buffy winced. “Maybe?”

Spike laughed. “Still, didn’t think it was as bad as all that.”

“What? Oh. No, I think I fell asleep over my schoolwork. And I really needed to get it done, too.”

“Yeah? What’s it all about, then?”

Buffy explained about the extra patrols, all the sleep she was and wasn’t getting, and her final papers. “And I’ve spent hours tonight planning out what I’m going to do, but I still don’t have a topic for my poetry paper.”

“Lucky for you,” Spike said, “we’re somewhere we can fix that. C’mon then. We’ll figure it out together.”

“What?” Buffy asked, then held up a hand to forestall him. “No, wait, sorry. I mean _what_?”

“Library,” Spike said slowly, as if she were very stupid. “’S full of books? Good place to plan a paper?”

Buffy tensed, settling into a readier stance, though no threat seemed to be forthcoming. “Did… Is there some kind of… body-snatching bacteria that lives in dusty library books? Has it infected your brain? Oh God, should I be worried about Giles?”

Spike was shifting his books in his grip, checking their covers before he put them down. He seemed to be only half paying attention to her. “What’re you rattlin’ on about?”

“Just… you do violence. And sarcasm. And… being annoying. You don’t do _homework_. I just kinda want to clarify. William the Bloody, master vampire, Slayer of Slayers, is going to – help me with my school assignment?”

“Yeah. You comin’ or not?”

Spike left his books on the nearest table and began striding away purposefully, the duster billowing out like a cape. After a moment, Buffy hurried to catch up, feeling like her head had been spun around and put back on her neck upside-down or something. Spike strode unhurriedly and unerringly out of the stacks, heading for the atrium. He really knew this place, she realized.

“Where are we going?”

“Poetry section. Dewey decimal, it’s around 811, but most American university libraries use Library o’ Congress classification system. God knows why – it’s total bollocks.”

How did he _know_ these things? Buffy couldn’t really see him hanging around libraries in his spare time. Then again, he seemed comfortable enough in this one.

Dream, she reminded herself. Her brain must be stuck in school-mode from spending the evening doing homework. Still, she asked, “You know about poetry?”

And only then she remembered. It had been one of those nights during her really bad time, when she’d been going to his crypt every day, sometimes more than once. As he threw her down on the bed (hard enough to hurt, because he loved her enough to hurt her, hard enough that she could tell herself it was something other than what it was), she’d seen, on his bedside table, a thick book lying open; and later, when he’d been turned away, getting dressed, she’d checked the author. It had been embossed in green on the fabric binding. Beautiful, which is why she remembered the image, because nothing in her life just then had been beautiful. Alfred, Lord Tennyson. At the time, she hadn’t known who that was. But the image had stuck.

“A bit,” said Spike, climbing ahead of her on the wide main staircase, but she knew him, and he was being evasive – an impression all but confirmed when his tone suddenly became defensive. “What, that surprises you, does it? Tell you what, Slayer, I’ve got a lot more goin’ on than you ever give me credit for. I’ve got skills, yeah, I got some passions –”

“It doesn’t surprise me.”

“– you know, I’ve got _layers_ – wait. What did you say?”

Buffy shrugged. “I didn’t know you spoke French.”

Spike hesitated. They’d reached the second floor. Along the far wall, the sun was pouring through windows, beyond which all that was visible was a clear rectangle of blue sky. The golden sunbeams were almost solid, and everything was honey-coloured and bubbling with thick light. It was more dreamlike than anything Buffy had seen yet.

“Dawn told you?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t like not knowing things about him, she didn’t say. It tore at her that he’d loved her, once, and yet there were things she didn’t know about him – not just secret things, but things he was willing to part with, things he was willing to tell, things he’d given away for free. Only she hadn’t wanted to hear.

“Well,” he said, awkward. “Yeah, well. Latin too. Or I used to. Once read all the _Aeneid_ in Latin.”

“Any other hidden talents?” Buffy asked drily. “Crochet, perhaps?”

Spike grinned. “I can fleece five bikers out of three grand in half an hour at a game o’ darts.”

“I said _hidden_ talents,” Buffy said. “ _That_ particular ability doesn’t surprise me at all.”

They wandered up and down the aisles, Buffy listing all the poets she could remember having read for her class. Roethke was the first one that came to mind. When she forgot a name, Spike was usually able to supply it based on a poem title or a line – “She wrote that poem about losing things,” Buffy would say, “The art of losing, or something?” and Spike would nod and reply, “Oh, yeah, sure, Elizabeth Bishop.”

“Adrienne Rich,” Buffy supplied. “W. H. Auden – I liked him. Oh, and…” She hesitated.

Juggling a stack of dog-eared collected works with abstract art or author portraits on all their covers, Spike glared at her impatiently.

“Sylvia Plath.”

Wordlessly, Spike headed for the end of the row, set his armload down on one of the large study tables in the main passageway, and made his way down the next aisle. It was radiant with the light now coming in horizontally from the window at its far end. Buffy followed him quietly, her bare feet making no sound on the cold linoleum.

“Here we are,” said Spike, and Buffy was momentarily overwhelmed by the number of Sylvia Plath books in front of them. Books of poetry, copies of _The Bell Jar_ with multiple introductions by academic luminaries, competing editions of her journals in varying states of abridgement. Spike was hunting through for a volume of her collected poetical works, which didn’t appear to be forthcoming.

“Plath’s good,” he said. “Death an’ obsession. She knew what life is, yeah. All about findin’ what’s on fire and grabbin’ hold ’til it burns you. Yeah. _There is a panther stalks me down: / One day I'll have my death of him … Along red network of his veins / What fires run, what craving wakes?_ ”

“I don’t know that one,” said Buffy. There was another of Plath’s poems in her ears; she was trying not to hear it.

Spike glanced at her once, quickly, and then away, as if trying to decide something. Finally, looking all the time at the bookshelf, he recited,

 _“_ _Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade;  
__Midnight cloaks the sultry grove;  
__The black marauder, hauled by love  
__On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.  
__Behind snarled thickets of my eyes  
__Lurks the lithe one; in dreams’ ambush  
__Bright those claws that mar the flesh  
__And hungry, hungry, those taut thighs.  
__His ardor snares me, lights the trees,  
__And I run flaring in my skin;  
__What lull, what cool can lap me in  
__When burns and brands that yellow gaze?_ ”

Buffy shivered. His voice, for as often as it squeaked high in defensiveness, could sweep low into deeper timbres at times of warning and seduction; it could become a forest of shadows. In it, she could see the hunting panther, his ravenous desire and sinuous heat, his darkness, his yellow eyes; and the poem’s speaker, running, wanting, burning with running, burning with wanting. Those words, in that voice… Suddenly hot, a roaring in her ears, Buffy rested her forehead against the cool beige metal of the shelf.

“I didn’t –” started Spike. “I didn’t mean anything. You asked, and…”

“Yes.” Buffy chuckled humourlessly. “I wanted more than the one Plath poem I know.”

“Why?” His voice was quiet now. So much light among the books, so much golden light. Like they were on fire. Everything was on fire, and they would be consumed. Words curled off the page in the heat, drifted, ash and sparkler, to the ceiling.

“It’s me,” whispered Buffy. “I’m the mad girl.”

She turned, rolling her head along the cold bookshelf, and regarded him. Metal pressed into the bone above her temple. In the sunset, his gaze was smoky, fulvous, molten. Face tight, he looked back, and then he pulled a copy of _The Bell Jar_ off the shelf and found the right page near the end.

He held it level, hands steady, and the light was so clean and so perfect that Buffy could see the texture of the woven pages, the little bleeds of ink at the swift edges of the black letters. She didn’t need to see. She remembered the first lines just fine.

“ _I shut my eyes_ ,” she said, “ _and all the world drops dead;_

“ _I lift my lids and all is born again.  
__(I think I made you up inside my head.)_ ”

The next line she didn’t remember, but Spike had the book in front of him, and he picked up where she left off. She could see the sun shining crimson through the bloodlessness of his cheek as he read,

“ _The stars go waltzing out in blue and red_ ,  
_And arbitrary blackness gallops in:  
__I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead._ ”

Buffy’s turn. She took a half step closer so she could see more clearly, and felt her shoulder brush his.

“ _I dreamed,_ ” she whispered. Her stomach was swooping, like when she’d been passing out on the bathroom floor.

“ _I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed,  
__And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.  
__(I think I made you up inside my head.)_ ”

Because she was watching him, she saw him swallow. “ _God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade_ ”; his voice roughened on the second half of the line and her chest ached, ached,

“ _Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:  
__I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead._ ”

The side of his face nearest to her was in shadow, the other half ablaze with cruel beautiful light that made all the softest hairs on his face flare up like lighthouse beacons, like firelight on water, and she couldn’t help it: she touched the side of his cheek again. When he turned the page, light mottling through the paper, it trembled beneath his fingers like it was still a leaf, and he was the wind.

“ _I fancied you’d return the way you said_ ,” she read, “ _But I grow old_ –” but here her voice broke, and saltwater pounded suddenly at the door of her throat and the shutters behind her eyes. Spike’s hand shot up and covered hers on his cheek, and he pressed it hard and willed her on with a steady gaze. “ _But I grow old_ ,” Buffy cracked out,

“ _and I forget your name.  
__(I think I made you up inside my head.)”_

In a broken voice no stronger than hers, a voice full of river stones and autumn wind, Spike answered,

“ _I should have loved a thunderbird instead;_  
“ _At least when spring comes they roar back again_.  
_I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead._ ”

And it was her chorus, her line, so Buffy finished for him, “ _(I think I made you up inside my head.)”_

They were face to face now, his hand on hers, hers on his cheek, and the sun, the sun on his back and on the books and the dust of her dream. Spike let his head bow, and Buffy let hers come forward to meet it until they were forehead to forehead, all eyes closed and breath tangling together.

And then, as Buffy shifted her weight to prepare to tilt her head, a twinge went through her thigh, and her leg half-buckled, startling a gasp out of her.

Spike’s hands instantly clasped bruise-tight on her shoulders, holding her up. “All right?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Buffy, embarrassed. “It’s just – you know,” and she pressed a palm to the unhealed gash on her leg. What she really felt like doing was punching at it with a closed fist.

Spike was frowning. “’S not healed yet?”

“Well, I keep patrolling on it,” said Buffy, “so no.”

“Still,” murmured Spike. Then, “Come on,” he added, and led her, one hand still gripping her upper arm tightly, to the table where they’d put their books. “Up you get.”

Bemused, Buffy obediently sat on the wooden table. Spike laid a hand over the wound, on top of her sweatpants, and Buffy shivered again. He looked up at her, and his eyes were brilliant yellow.

 _There is a panther stalks me down_ , remembered Buffy – and yet his gaze wasn’t predatory, but soft and hesitant.

“Mind if I take a look?” he asked. Shrugging her assent, Buffy pushed the leg of her sweatpants up as far as she could, but it wouldn’t go high enough to reveal more than a half-inch of the gash. She looked up and their gazes met, both caught on the lip of a question. She felt that they were trapped, that it would be more awkward to stop now and admit defeat, and yet…

But as she hesitated, she watched Spike realize what was happening, and she saw the light fading from his eyes to be replaced by fear, saw his muscles tense so he could spring away from her and, without making a conscious decision, she was suddenly slipping her waistband down over her hips.

“Wait –” he said. “You don’t –” But by then Buffy was sitting in her underwear on the cool wood veneer of the library table. It felt decidedly strange, more naked than nakedness would be.

“There you go,” she tried to say brightly, but it came out shaky instead. Spike didn’t mention it – but then, Buffy realized as he silently bent down to examine her wound, his hands were shaking too. _Keeps me steady. I should know._ As his fingers peeled away the gauze and came to rest lightly on the skin of her thigh, Buffy had to bite back, not entirely successfully, a gasp, and Spike’s grip tightened spasmodically in response before just as quickly letting go. Neither of them mentioned any of it. Spike leaned in close, so close his nose almost touched the half-scabbed gash, so close she could feel his breath, fast and unneeded, against the over-sensitive skin.

Closing his eyes, he took a long inhale through his nose. Buffy breathed. Breathed. Then Spike tilted his head and frowned, and did it again, but his hands had stopped shaking. In tiny movements, as gently as she’d ever seen him do anything, he extended his tongue and pressed just the tip of it to her wound.

Buffy felt like something in her was exploding.

Oblivious but seemingly satisfied, Spike nodded. “No wonder it’s not healin’,” he said. “Must be some compound on those demon hooks. ’S keepin’ the wound open. Ask the witch for some poultice or healin’ salve or other – ’m sure she can whip up something.”

“Right,” said Buffy, breathing out shakily. With arms that felt a little wobbly, she picked up her sweatpants from the table beside her and pulled them on again over her bare feet and legs. Settling herself, she said, “If I was going to fall asleep over my homework, at least I’m having helpful dreams.”

Spike had been standing over by the shelves with his hands in his pockets, carefully looking in the opposite direction while she’d put her pants back on. Now he took his hands out very suddenly, paused for a moment as though he didn’t know what to do with them, then balled them into fists and shoved them back in his duster. He stalked a couple of tight paces along the aisle and back, his shoulders tense. Buffy watched, confused. He looked angry – no, _furious_.

He came to a rest and looked at her. “Look,” he snapped, then forced himself to take a breath. “Look,” he repeated, more calmly, though he hadn’t been able to smooth away the edge in his voice. “It may not matter to you – guess it doesn’t – but there’s only so much I can be jerked around. Do you even _mean_ any of it?”

Buffy tried, she really did, but she could not for the life of her figure out what he was talking about. “Any of what? Why are you pissed at me?”

“All that rot you’ve said about missing me. Do you mean it? Or are you just blatherin’ on because you think this is a dream – which it’s not, by the by. Are you only sayin’ it because I’m not real? ’Cause it’s easy enough to say – easy to make yourself feel better ’bout me bein’ dead. Good way to ease your conscience, innit? Tell Spike what he wants to hear, be nice to him now he’s dead. Doesn’t matter, because it’s not real. It doesn’t mean anythin’ anyway.”

Buffy opened her mouth, but he cut her off. “No, let me finish.” He breathed out slowly, taking a second to calm himself. When he spoke again, it was quieter, slower. “’Cause all that’s fine, really. I get that. I do. But I got to know, Buffy – do you mean those things? Would you say ’em if you thought I could really hear?”

Spike seemed to have run out of steam. Dragging one hand back through his hair, he turned a shoulder into the side of the nearest bookshelf and let himself slump against it, defeated.

His fingers still tangled in his hair, he said to the linoleum, “Would you still say them if this were real?”

It would be easy to fob off the question. Easy to say no, or to say yes. No consequences, not inside her own brain. But instead Buffy considered it with the self-reflective seriousness she’d recently discovered herself capable of. A few paces off, Spike shifted so he was turned away from her, leaning forward on the bookshelf with one hand, a locked line from heel to shoulder, from shoulder to fingertip.

“No,” she concluded. “I wouldn’t.”

He didn’t move, but she could see every vein bulging beneath his sky-pale skin. She went on, “I don’t think I’d have the courage. Because yes. I mean it.” Spike turned. Buffy couldn’t read his face. Something felt like it was stretching out under her ribcage, like a caged bird’s wings. _I feel my being dance from ear to ear._ “Yes, I mean it. Yes. I do, yes.”

His face unlocked, loosened not into a smile but into something more human, less marmoreal, something with blood beneath. “Did you,” he started, then swallowed, and Buffy’s stomach swooped again. But all he said was, “Did you just finish readin’ _Ulysses_ , then?”

“What?” asked Buffy, confused. “No. What? _Ulysses_? Why?”

“Never mind,” muttered Spike. He was still standing on the far side of the table; he poked at a few of the books they’d heaped up on its surface.

When he didn’t say anything else, Buffy mentally shrugged. Spike said weird things sometimes. At least her dream-brain had got that much right. “I still don’t have a poet picked out for my paper,” she pointed out.

“Sure you do,” said Spike. He was holding up a book. “The first one you mentioned. Always the right choice. Roethke – he’s the one you got into it with your prof over, isn’t he? There you go, then.”

She’d forgotten she’d told him that. And now that he’d mentioned it, Roethke was _inevitable_. And so obvious. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? “Oh,” Buffy said. Then, “Do you smell that?”

“Smell what, love?”

“Coffee,” said Buffy, and she woke up with her head pillowed in her arms on the kitchen table. Giles was setting a mug of coffee down by her nose, next to the Chaucer printout trapped under her elbow.

“Mm,” she told him. “Thanks.” Barely lifting her head, she drank half the cup in one go, and then popped up, kissed Giles on the cheek, grabbed her backpack, and headed for the door.

“Buffy?” Giles asked, poleaxed. He was rubbing his cheek with one hand and holding his own coffee mug with the other. “Where are you going?”

“Library!” she called, already halfway down the hall. “There’s a book I need.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's epigraph is, of course, Roethke again. This time, from "The Abyss." (By the way, many of these poems aren't available online, but they can all be found in Roethke's [Collected Poems](https://www.amazon.com/Collected-Poems-Theodore-Roethke/dp/0385086016). If you're interested, you _might_ be able to find it at your local library. Or support an independent bookstore!)
> 
> The Sylvia Plath poem Spike recites in part is "[Pursuit](http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/poem/pursuit/)," which is a hell of a poem. She wrote it two days after meeting the man who'd be her (it turns out abusive) husband, the poet Ted Hughes, and good god does it parallel the Buffy/Spike relationship of early season 6.
> 
> "[Mad Girl's Love Song](http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/poem/madgirl/)," which Buffy and Spike read together, was included in the biographical note at the end of _The Bell Jar_ , which was published a month before Plath's suicide.
> 
> After Buffy says, “Yes, I mean it. Yes. I do, yes,” Spike asks her whether she's just read _Ulysses_ (the James Joyce novel, not the Tennyson poem) because its final line ends "...all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."


	8. Chapter 8

_Last night I dreamt of a jauntier principle of order;  
_ _Today I eat my usual diet of shadows._

\+ + +

Buffy had barely gotten to the library when she remembered that she had poetry seminar in an hour and a half – and, after that, the long-avoided coffee with Professor Edwards. Grumpily, she checked out a volume of Roethke’s collected works, trudged twenty minutes back to the house, and showered so quickly the water was still cold when she got out, but she still didn’t have time to get herself an Americano and a pastry before class started.

Edwards had clearly had his caffeine fix already: he was in fine form, not a hair out of place and the wave in it so crisp he might have had his natural locks replaced with a sandstone replica. Buffy sat at the far end of the table, next to Charlie, who took one look at her and gave her his half-full cappuccino in a paper to-go cup. Buffy contemplated kissing him.

“At the end of the semester,” she said to him, after she’d taken a big, warm, fragrant, _coffee-thank-God_ sip, “I am taking you out for a beer. Many beers. Maybe tequila.”

As usual, Charlie looked awkward, but he smiled at her anyway. “A pint’ll do fine,” he said.

They were making a minor digression this week into contemporary Canadian poetry, and the centerpiece of the reading assignment had been Anne Carson’s _Autobiography of Red_. Buffy had actually read it, since she thought Edwards might want to talk about it over coffee – it was, in fact, the only reading she’d managed this week. At first, she hadn’t been able to make heads or tails of it, and then, halfway through, had suddenly loved it wholly and unexpectedly and without knowing why, with a feeling like she’d missed a step on the basement stairs and tumbled all the way to the bottom.

“All right,” said Edwards, after a brief intro about Anne Carson, who was apparently a scholar of Classics and fluent in Ancient Greek. Buffy didn’t know that Ancient Greek was something you could be fluent in. She made a mental note to tell Spike, before remembering that he would already know, because he wasn’t actually real. He existed only in her head; he’d know everything that she did.

Edwards went on, “She’s subtitled this ‘A novel in verse’ – or her publisher has, at any rate – so let’s do something a little unusual. I’m going to ask someone to describe it as they would a novel, and someone else to describe it as they would a poem. Who wants to go first? Let’s see… Amelia?”

“Well…” Amelia, flustered, flipped some pages. “It’s a retelling of, er, the myth of Geryon? And Herakles? Who – um, that’s Hercules. And he, er, stole Geryon’s cattle for one of his labours. There were twelve – twelve labours. Only, er, in this version there – there aren’t any, er, cattle…”

“All right, all right,” Edwards interrupted, “someone please save Amelia.”

Charlie cleared his throat. “It’s a retelling of the tale,” he said, “but a very loose one. Geryon is an adolescent boy who is also a red, winged monster, and he and Herakles fall in love. In terms of plot, not much happens, I suppose. They visit Herakles’s grandmother in his hometown, and they all drive to the volcano nearby. But then they break up. Then years pass and then they meet again in South America, and they go with Herakles’s new boyfriend Ancash to _his_ hometown, which is also near a volcano.”

“Good. Tell me about Geryon.”

“He’s an artist,” said Charlie immediately. “A photographer. And he’s been working since he was small on what he calls his autobiography, which really seems like it’s a linked series of mixed-media works.” The way Charlie was talking about this, so confidently, made Buffy wonder if he was an artist, too. Or taking a minor in art. She’d never asked, she realized, looking at the cappuccino he’d given her. She’d never asked him anything about himself.

“He’s sensitive,” Charlie continued. “I mean sensitive to… the world. Like a tuned antenna. But also the way you’d mean it normally. A mama’s boy, you’d call him, only the text doesn’t. Nor does he think of himself that way, I think.

“But he _is_ different. I mean, he’s gay, obviously, but not just that. The red, the wings – that’s all ways of showing his difference physically. Only that’s also what gives him power. It’s what lets him be an artist. And also – also Ancash tells him that there are stories about red people who come from the volcano. It’s…” He turned some pages, seemingly without realizing that everyone was staring at him. Buffy had never heard him say so many words at once before. It was like he’d sat up from a grave, come alive, and suddenly started breathing. “Here. Page 129. _Yazcamac_ , Ancash calls them. Eyewitnesses. ‘ _Yes that’s what they say the Yazcamac return as red people with wings, / all their weaknesses burned away – / and their mortality._ ’ So Geryon’s difference becomes a marker of a sort of mystical strength.”

“Excellent!” said Edwards, and he even seemed to mean it. “Thank you, Charlie. Before we talk more about that, can someone tell us how they’d describe this work if they were talking about it as a more traditional poem? Buffy?”

Buffy had never quite made it to page 129, because as she flipped there from the back of the book, she’d been caught by a passage she’d underlined while reading:

_What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them  
_ _developed a dangerous cloud.  
_ _Geryon knew he must not go back into the cloud. Desire is no light thing._

“What?” she asked, distracted. “Oh. Um, sure. I guess it’s about…” She frowned, attention still half on what she’d just read. “About the line between love and obsession. But… destructive love, love that consumes you. Love you _want_ to be consumed by. Like a volcano, I guess, which is why there are all these volcanoes in the book. When we’re in love like that, it’s like we fly into the volcano, like Geryon does at the end, and when we come out, we’re…”

“Eyewitnesses,” Charlie supplied when she trailed off, and Buffy smiled at him and nodded.

“Yeah,” she said, “like we’ve been through a – an atrocity. An atrocity of love. That’s what he wants to do. Geryon, I mean. Witness stuff. It’s why he brings his camera. He cares about… documenting things. It gives him some space, I think. Some distance from the world.”

Buffy could understand that. The world was a hard place to be in – to be in all the time, ceaselessly, relentlessly. Hadn’t she said that once? _The hardest thing in this world is to live in it._ Maybe it was easier with a camera lens between you and everything that came at you, or for you. Maybe if you couldn’t hold a stake up between you and the world, a camera was the next best thing. A camera, a sketchpad, a pen.

For the first time in her life, Buffy understood why someone might want to write poetry.

“Except he’s not a _documentary_ photographer,” Edwards pointed out. “Charlie said he’s an artist. So what he’s doing isn’t bearing witness, is it? He’s not relaying facts. He’s creating representations of the world.”

Still a way of putting something between you and it, Buffy thought rebelliously. And a way of… looking for truth. But she didn’t get a chance to say it. In her Scottish lilt, Emma was tentatively suggesting, “Well, don’t we do that all the time? I mean, when you look at someone, you always have some idea of them in your head that’s different from their idea of themselves.”

And sometimes, Buffy thought, all you could see was your idea of them, and you never saw who they really were. Not until it was too late.

“So it’s all representations, isn’t it?” continued Emma. “We’re all making representations all of the time. Geryon’s just doing his more, like… concretely? Visually. I think ’cause he’s so obsessed with his… you know, his looks. Bein’ red an’ all.”

“Well, yeah,” Charlie put in sharply, as if he’d been personally insulted. “Wouldn’t you be? He grew up bright red, with wings. He can’t help wondering what it means to be a monster, or for people to call him a monster. Especially a monster who feels like a man.”

Buffy felt like she’d been punched in the gut.

Around her, the conversation continued, and then Edwards lectured for a while, but all the words entered her head as a mosquito’s buzzing and whirled around in it the same way and then went out again. She was flipping through her book, not really seeing it, and the lines she’d marked because she’d liked them floated up to her and bathed her eyes as shapes, without connecting to any meaning in her brain.

_Geryon’s / whole body formed one arch of a cry – upcast to that custom, the human custom of wrong love._

_in that blurred state / between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul_

_May God favour you with dreams._

I think they were dreams.

_the dull amplitude of rain_

_Under the seams runs the pain._

I know I’m a monster, he’d said _._ But you treat me like a man.

_Who can a monster blame for being red?_

\+ + +

After class, Buffy nodded to Charlie and then took her time packing up her bag so she wound up being the last one in the room with Edwards.

“Well,” he said in a blustering kind of way, and it occurred to Buffy that he was feeling awkward. “Ready, then?”

“Lead on.”

As they left the building, he said, “I know we agreed to coffee, and we can stick to that if you’d like – but, as it’s past noon, I was wondering if you’d be up for lunch, if you’re hungry?”

“ _Famished_ ,” said Buffy, who had been wondering how she was possibly going to make it through a coffee date without shoving five whole scones into her face. Although, on the upside, that would probably have scared him off pretty effectively. Still, even the prospect of a slightly longer forced interaction with Edwards couldn’t outweigh the appeal of real food.

“Great!” he said, as he held the door for her in a way that made Buffy suspect he thought he was being chivalrous. Since he was only being polite, like _any normal human_ would be, Buffy didn’t bother thanking him. Catching up as she swept past him into the drizzle, he added, “I know a great pub – it’s just a few streets away.”

Say what you would about Edwards’s heavy-handed bluster, the pub _was_ quaint and cozy, with a stained-glass coat of arms above the door and a refurbished Elizabethan bar done all in warm wood. Looking around, Buffy saw with satisfaction that the lunch portions, as befitted the place, were enormous.

After the chilly misting rain, it was pleasantly steamy inside. They found a table by one of the fireplaces, which had been laid but not yet lit. When the busboy came around to the table next to theirs, Edwards pointed to the fireplace and asked – somewhat peremptorily, Buffy thought – “Can’t we get that lit? It’s blooming freezing out.”

The British slang sounded put-on and out of place in his broad American accent. The busboy said, noncommittally, “I’ll see what I can do, mate,” and shuttled off again; and Edwards, after a quick consultation with Buffy, followed him up to the bar to order a pint of Guinness and a Diet Coke. On his return, Buffy, curious about the accent, took a sip of her Coke and asked, “Where are you from?”

For the next five minutes, she heard all about Connecticut, where he’d grown up, and Boston, where he’d gone to school, and how fond he was of the Arizona desert, where his grandparents had lived during the winters when he was young.

“I just love the desert,” he explained expansively, after three large sips of his Guinness. “Beautiful, in a sort of prickly way. But most people don’t feel that way. You know – as Eliot would have it:

“ _And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,  
__And the dry stone no sound of water. Only  
__There is shadow under this red rock,  
__(Come in under the shadow of this red rock)…_

“Right?” He took another sip of beer. Buffy had no idea what he was talking about, but Edwards didn’t seem to notice. “You ever seen it?”

“The desert? I grew up near it.” Which was probably safer than saying she’d once followed a mountain lion into the middle of it to fulfill an ancient vision-quest ritual.

“Really?” He seemed honestly surprised, as if only a certain class of people could possibly have seen a geographical phenomenon that covered a third of Earth’s landmass, and he hadn’t suspected Buffy of belonging to such an elite group. “Where are you from?”

“Southern California. Sunnydale.”

“Oh, _right_ ,” Edwards said, snapping his fingers. “There was a note about you from the department head – you did a few years of college there, didn’t you?” He looked at her with a calculating gaze, and Buffy suspected he was trying to guess her age. “I heard what happened there. Sinkhole, wasn’t it? Earthquakes and Southern California. Makes the news even here when a whole town disappears like that – _ffttt_.” He snapped his fingers again to illustrate her hometown being wiped off the face of the earth, and grinned. “I don’t suppose you had anything to do with that?”

Clearly he thought he was hilarious.

“Absolutely,” said Buffy. “It was me. I destroyed the town. Brought the whole place down.”

Edwards laughed, as he was supposed to; and because he threw his head back to do it, he didn’t notice that she never smiled.

The busboy came back around to regretfully inform Edwards that they couldn’t light the fire until later in the afternoon, owner’s policy, very sorry sir. Edwards, beginning to be lightly flushed from his beer, waved it off and headed to the bar again to order food – fish and chips for him, and a second Guinness. Buffy asked for a smoked brisket burger with fries and a side of honey glazed carrots. Sliding back into his seat with his beer, Edwards raised an eyebrow.

“Hungry?”

“I haven’t eaten yet.”

“Aha!” he declared. “No wonder you were so quiet today. Not enough protein to fuel all those opinions.”

“I talked!” she protested, because tackling that part of his accusation was less likely to make her lean across the table and throttle him than the “opinions” part, which Buffy strongly suspected he wouldn’t have said if she were male. Then again, if she were male, they probably wouldn’t be having lunch in the first place. “I said the thing about love being like a volcano. Well,” she amended, “some love.”

“Mm,” said Edwards, in the tone he used when about to call on someone he _knew_ hadn’t done the reading. Buffy’s heart sank. “Have you ever been in love like that?”

“Yes,” said Buffy quellingly.

Edwards didn’t take the hint. “When?”

Buffy looked away from his voraciously curious face. A greedy face, she thought, a face that would devour all her stories. What was that monster from Greek myth he’d mentioned in class, the whirlpool one in the _Odyssey_ that swallowed everything? She couldn’t remember its name. But that was Edwards’s curiosity. It would eat her whole.

There was a high ornate mantel over the fireplace, dark wood on which were ranged an old-fashioned clock and a few decorative volumes bound in blue leather. It looked like it could have been around, just like that, for centuries. Maybe the books were soldered in place by ancient grit. Buffy wondered whether this pub had been here for two hundred years, if Angel and Spike and Darla and Drusilla had ever breezed in, laughing like maniacs and high on the kill. It was the kind of thing she might have asked Angel, once, though he wouldn’t have answered. Spike _would_ have answered, if she’d asked. But she hadn’t. With Angel, she knew she now never would; and with Spike, she never could.

“Once,” Buffy said, dodging the question as much as possible. “And maybe – maybe twice.”

“ _Maybe_? Seems like the kind of thing you’d know. What was it you said – ‘love that consumes you, love you want to be consumed by’?”

Buffy blushed. In his slightly mocking New England tones, the words sounded childish. And yet – _consumed:_ that was exactly how she’d felt. Eaten alive, or burned to the bones. By her own hunger, and by his.

 _How people get power over one another,_ Anne Carson had written, _this mystery._

“Maybe it was love,” she said stubbornly. “Or maybe something close, only just as… just as intense. It was…” She sighed. “Complicated.” Realizing how that sounded, she added defensively, “And I don’t mean that he was still dating his ex, or we didn’t want to ruin our friendship, or we never sat down and ‘defined our relationship,’ or whatever it is people usually mean when they say things are complicated. I mean really, messily, _catastrophically_ complicated. We kept… hurting each other. On purpose. Over and over. Sometimes very badly.”

For once, Edwards wasn’t speaking. He took a slow sip of his beer and let his hands rest open on the table. Buffy blinked and glanced back toward the mantel and imagined how it would look by candlelight and gas lantern glow, before the chandeliers had been electrified, before people could easily bring light wherever they went. The world had been darker, once.

Now she had streetlights and flashlights, porch lights and runway lights, headlights and taillights and office lights, and the pub was aglow with incandescent bulbs in the chandeliers and sconces and inset pot lights over the bar, and all the stars were gone, and Spike was gone, the dream version was fake, and Edwards was just sitting, listening. And, unlike her friends, whom she could never talk to about this, he didn’t know who Spike was, or that he was an evil killer, or that he’d tried to rape her. All he’d know was what Buffy told him. Edwards would assume he was a man.

A man. Not a monster.

Buffy hadn’t known how badly she’d needed someone who thought that. The pale face of the clock on the mantel wavered in her sight alarmingly, and, to cover, she started speaking again, talking over the tremble in her voice. “And then… a lot of things happened to us. Really – really bad things. Think of the most awful…” Her voice broke, and she swallowed hard. “Anyway. I changed. He changed. Things got worse. Much worse. Then he… went away for a while and came back –” Buffy almost laughed. What had she been going to say? _Better_. _Crazy_. _Ensouled_.

Edwards sat across from her, waiting. Around them, other patrons laughed, sipped beer, ate lamb stew and mash. Suddenly it all felt foreign, isolating and strange, and she longed desperately for home. Home was gone. Home was over. Home was under a mountain of rubble, and she was the one who’d put it there.

Edwards had barely touched his second beer, but his hands lay quietly on the table, not cupped around the glass. “What happened, in the end?” he asked softly.

“He died,” Buffy said. “In May.”

She couldn’t see the clock at all now, only a kind of drifting circle, a shimmering veil like the air before the demons had come through. “One hundred and seventy-seven days ago.”

_Hundred forty-seven days yesterday. Hundred and forty-eight today. ’Cept today doesn't count, does it?_

Buffy turned back to Edwards, who was only a pale blur against the dark wood paneling of the pub. “He liked poetry,” she said helplessly. “He liked Tennyson.”

“I’m sorry,” said Edwards. He sounded sincere.

“No, that’s – it’s important. That’s what I want to tell you about him. And that he did something – something great, at the end. That’s who he was.”

“Buffy,” said Edwards. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up something painful.”

 _You asked about a volcano,_ Buffy wanted to say. _What did you think would happen? All you get is burns and ashes._ But she didn’t trust her voice yet. With the knuckle of her index finger, she swiped at the corner of her eye, where it was damp.

Just then, their food arrived, and in the chaos of trying to fit the plates on the tiny two-top, Buffy had a moment to collect herself. Afterward, she stared at her food, not hungry anymore.

Edwards hadn’t started yet either. He was watching her keenly. “Did you tell him, before he died, how you felt about him?” His voice was gentle, and it was such an unexpectedly perceptive question that Buffy was surprised into answering.

“I tried.” She swallowed. “He didn’t believe me.”

“Why not?”

A bark of a laugh, unamused and bitter, fought free of her chest. “Because _I_ didn’t believe me.” She picked up a fry, then put it down again. “Not then.”

She’d told him she loved him. She might have spared him that. Only something monstrous could do this to people. Desire was no light thing, and love was horrible, hideous. Immense.

Spike had known that. Spike, who was large in spirit, and monstrous in nature, but who also wasn’t really either one of those things in the end. He was a small person, after all, one who tried to do right. Spike had never in his life been ashamed. What courage, she thought, what courage it must have taken to be so completely what he was, even when that meant changing everything he thought he’d been. What courage, to feel so utterly how he felt. _We think by feeling. What is there to know?_

This. There was _this_ to know, and he hadn’t known, because she hadn’t told him until everything was on fire, and they were there in the heart of the volcano, and, together, they had become for one last time a calamity, a catastrophe, the final conflagration.

“I dream of it now,” she said. “I dream about telling him. Now that it’s too late. Now that I can’t fix it. I dream it better. I dream it right.”

Edwards put down his fork and stared out the leaded windows into the slate-blue lash outside. Then he said, without looking at her, quiet and clear like the sound of rain on the roof of a silent car,

“ _Death closes all; but something ere the end,_  
_Some work of noble note, may yet be done,  
__Not unbecoming men that strove with gods._ ”

Buffy could say nothing.

She remembered Spike’s face after Glory, his chest after the First. _Men that strove with gods_. They hadn’t striven with gods, her and Spike. They’d survived them. Maybe that was the best you could ask.

Gods were like destinies. They weren’t something you could fight. Only something you could live through, or not.

“It’s from ‘Ulysses.’ You said Tennyson, right?” Edwards asked. Buffy nodded. “He would have known the lines.” He picked up his fork again and pointed it at her plate. “Eat. You’ll remember you’re hungry soon enough.”

How big a life must be, Buffy thought, to have gods in it, and still end with the choice to fly into the mouth of a volcano. Fly straight in, with a monster’s wings and the soul of an artist.

To end with a soul.

Buffy picked up a French fry and started to eat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter epigraph is from Roethke's "Her Becoming," which is part of a sequence called "Meditations of an Old Woman" in his 1958 book, _Words for the Wind_.
> 
> I cannot recommend _[Autobiography of Red](https://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Red-Anne-Carson/dp/037570129X)_ highly enough. I think it's one of the most interesting and beautiful books of the past couple decades. It's full of unique and original descriptions of feelings and perceptions that you recognize instantly but never thought of putting into words before, and minor revelations. I love everything Anne Carson does, even when I can't understand her at all. She's brilliant.
> 
> Dialogue from 5x22, "The Gift"; 7x02, "Beneath You"; 6x03, "After Life."
> 
> Edwards quotes T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," a long poem that rewards sustained attention and hard study, but that is generally agreed to be (at least on first reading) fragmentary, obscure, and extremely difficult.
> 
> Tennyson's "[Ulysses](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses)," which Edwards quotes at the end, is another of my favourite poems ever written. It is sad and beautiful and resigned and hopeless and unyielding, and it makes me cry.


	9. Chapter 9

_Sudden renewal of the self—from where?  
_ _A raw ghost drinks the fluid in my spine;  
_ _I know I love, yet know not where I am;  
_ _I paw the dark, the shifting midnight air.  
_ _Will the self, lost, be found again? In form?  
_ _I walk the night to keep my five wits warm._

\+ + +

The rain did not let up.

The next day, Buffy found Willow nursing a mug of tea in the front office and asked her to take a look at her leg. All she said was that it wasn’t healing as quickly as it should, and could Willow please check if there was any magic or demon residue keeping it open. She said nothing about Spike, nothing about the idea coming to her in a dream. Willow spent the evening researching, whipped up a purplish-brown goo that seemed composed ninety percent of things that smelled bad and ten percent of burned paper, and smeared it all over Buffy’s thigh.

“This looks nasty,” she said as she worked, wrinkling her nose.

“Hey, I wasn’t going to say anything,” said Buffy. “I think it’s the colour. Also the texture. Maybe just an _eensy_ bit the rotten-egg smell.”

“Not the poultice, your _leg_. Why didn’t you say anything earlier?”

They were in the upstairs bathroom and there were candles of various sizes and colours on every flat surface. _Every_ flat surface. There was one balanced on top of the soap dispenser. It had taken nearly forty minutes just to light them all.

“Isn’t there a spell for this?” Buffy had asked as they’d set up.

“Well, yeah,” said Willow. “But if I tried to light all two hundred candles at once, I’d probably, um, burn the bathroom down.”

“Ah,” said Buffy. “Yeah, okay, that would be bad. I just spent sixty pounds on new skin care products.”

Now she shrugged, breathing deep – some of the candles were scented, and despite the eau-de-sewage of the poultice, the tiny room smelled cozily of fire, vanilla, coconut, pine, and cinnamon. The heat from all the flames was incredible. Sitting on the fluffy bathmat in flannel pyjama shorts, Buffy felt fully warm for the first time in days. She leaned back against the bathroom vanity and sighed in comfort. Whatever was in the poultice, it was working already. Pain was leeching out of her wound, replaced by a tingling freshness, like the kind left by toothpaste in the mouth. Buffy felt her face relax. She hadn’t realized how much she’d just gotten used to her leg hurting all the time.

“I thought it was normal,” she said in response to Willow’s question, watching flames dance in the dark from behind her closed eyelids. “From patrolling and stuff.”

“Next time,” Willow said, “don’t do that. ’Kay?”

Every night for three nights, Buffy applied the pungent goo and covered it with a protective coating of gauze, and by Sunday the wound had closed up completely. But the long, messy healing process had left a scar, a wide purplish streak up the outside of her thigh.

“Dunno what you’re complaining ’bout,” Spike told her when she whined about it. “Hell, most warriors’d be proud to have a scar like that.”

“Most warriors,” Buffy groused, “aren’t worried about their swimsuit bodies.”

They were back in her Sunnydale bedroom, Buffy splayed out on her stomach on her bed, Spike sitting on the carpet, his back against the dresser and his booted feet stretched out in front of him. Those boots looked strange in her frilly bedroom, out of place, like they’d been helicoptered in for a special event.

Spike rolled his eyes. “It’ll fade, Slayer. Get back to work.”

Since that day at the library, Buffy had been working on her papers with Spike as much as she could. If she was going to have remarkably clear dreams featuring a Spike who was knowledgeable about English literature and in which she had long swathes of uninterrupted time, she figured she might as well get a little work done. Since she couldn’t take notes or printouts or essay drafts between the real world and the dream one, this mostly meant working on her first three essays while she was awake, and reading Roethke’s collected poems in her sleep.

“I’m reading, I’m reading,” she said grumpily.

“Where are you with it?”

Since Buffy seemed to show up in Sunnydale wherever Spike happened to be – because it was _her dream_ , she told him, though he continued to insist, with typically dream-like logic, that of course it wasn’t – Spike had started carrying around the Roethke book in his duster. Which meant he’d started reading it. And, since he apparently spent a lot more time in her dream landscapes than she did, he was a hundred pages ahead of her.

“Page 76. Partway through –” she turned back a section to see which of Roethke’s published books this set of poems came from – “ _Praise to the End!_ I read a little over lunch today.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be working on – what is it, Chaucer?”

“Finished that one on Monday,” Buffy said proudly. “I’m _supposed_ to be writing my paper for Intro to Literary Theory. Major snooze-fest. Then the one on _Middlemarch_. But reading _this_ –” she tapped the purple and white cover – “is better.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I was _right_ ,” she crowed. “What I said to Edwards was that Roethke feels all trapped in his body. And this early poetry is full of that. I mean, you’ve got the greenhouse poems, right?” Roethke, Buffy had discovered, had grown up around his father’s greenhouses, and his poems were bursting with plants – with life and rich loam, with heavy botanical air and green things stretching upwards. She’d never thought about plants, really, one way or another, but she swore that Roethke could _hear_ them growing, and make her hear it, too.

“But there’s also all this imagery of stagnant water and rotting things. Like a total obsessive disgust with flesh and everything that decays. Look, he’s got a whole poem called ‘Epidermal Macabre,’ which tells you something, right? _The rags of my anatomy_ , he says. He’s just so tired of being a – a person in a body.”

“You going to write about that?” Spike asked. “Ought to. Really show up your old bugger of a professor.”

“Yeah,” said Buffy, and had to bite down on her instinctive protest of, _He’s not all bad._ Even in her own dream, with a fake Spike, she didn’t want to tell him about lunch with Edwards. It felt too raw, open, like a wound somewhere she couldn’t reach.

“Read me some?” Spike looked up at her from the floor, and she caught his eye for a long moment. Sun slit itself on the blinds and striped his face. He blinked, as if to get it out of his eyes, as if it were water.

“All right.” Buffy scanned the page – the first line of this section of the poem was _Touch and arouse_ , which was too dangerous to say out loud even in a dream. She silently read two stanzas more, then spoke,

“ _I hear the clap of an old wind.  
_ _The cold knows when to come.  
_ _What beats in me  
_ _I still bear._ ”

“I still bear,” she repeated, feeling the dark all around her and the sun fading out and her heart, amplified against the bedspread, thumping on and on, the only beating heart in the room – and when she swam to consciousness, slowly, in London, the sound had changed to rain on the windowpane, rattling the bare twigs of the rowan in the early morning fog.

\+ + +

On the last Monday in November, the floods began.

Not in London – they had a barrier on the river to prevent it – but for a hundred miles upriver, all through Oxford and Reading and Slough, the Thames overflowed its banks. The onrush of water forced evacuations, washed trees and dead carcasses and raw sewage through towns and villages. The playing fields of Eton were submerged three feet deep.

Still the rain went on.

That night, instead of eating dinner at the table as usual, they gathered around the television in the front parlor and ate bowls of chili on the couch. The news was showing scenes of devastation. Emergency shelters had been opened up and down the country. Cameras followed uprooted centenarian oaks drifting downstream; they zoomed in on old women leaning out of windows, holding small frantic dogs, trying to get into motorboats with their blanket-wrapped bundles of belongings.

“I’m not sure how long the country can go on like this,” said Pat, shaking his head. “Haven’t seen floods this bad since I was a boy.”

“When was that, the Renaissance?” Dawn teased, but Pat just chuckled self-deprecatingly. Buffy wondered how Dawn managed to make brattiness work so well for her. It had only ever won Buffy dislike – never affection.

“Everything at the worksite is soaked,” Xander said. “We’ve assembled as much as we can under tarps, but if it doesn’t let up soon, we’re going to be at least a few weeks delayed. Do you know how much that _costs_?” At everyone’s disapproving looks, he held up his hands. “What?”

“Xand, people are being forced out of their homes?” Buffy nodded at the television.

“Ah. Right.” Shoving a spoonful of chili into his mouth, he muttered stubbornly, “Just sayin’.”

“You don’t think there’s something supernatural about the weather, do you, Mr. Giles?” asked Cynthia, one of the newer Watchers.

“Not that I know of,” said Giles. “You’re not hearing anything like that from the coven, are you, Willow?”

“Nope.”

“Just a bit of regular bad luck, then, I’m afraid,” said Giles. “I’m sure it’ll let up soon.”

“It better,” said Buffy, stretching as she stood up to spend yet another soaking-wet evening outdoors. “I think I’m growing mold between my toes.”

“Ewwww,” said Dawn.

The weather was so rough – gale-force gusts in addition to the endless rain – that Buffy had given the trainee slayers the night off, so she set off alone toward Lambeth. She’d had to add some of the dingier districts to her patrol rotation. With demons searching out above-ground hidey holes, more places than graveyards were swarming with nasties.

As she crossed the swollen Thames, Buffy guiltily admitted that she was hoping for an end to the rain somewhat less enthusiastically than she strictly ought to be.

London was cold, and wet, and definitively not home, and with her American accent and clumsy Valley-girl inelegance, she would never fit in; and all of her friends were cautious, cautious with her, and the house was big and dark and empty, and school was _hard_ , even if she was discovering that she had a few talents at it; and Spike, the one person who had seemed to fully understand her without her ever having to say anything – even when she hated it – was gone. So much of her time was spent alone, in the dark and the rain and the wind, pursuing lonely violence, and there was, in the end, very little to comfort her in her daily life. Whatever else the dreams were – disconcerting, for one, and guilt-inducing too, because she felt like she was using Spike’s memory for her own consolation – they were comforting. Spike was in them, and the sun, and home.

And she only dreamed when it rained.

On the bridge, she stopped and looked down at the flush of high water bellowing below. Spindrift whipped off the rough surface of the waves, and gusts sent the rain driving viciously in unpredictable deluges, the drops bullet hard. No air but water. Not far off, the lights of Parliament shone wetly through the howl. Few people were out, and they struggled with umbrellas in the bitter wind, or hurried along resignedly with their hands in their pockets and their shoulders hunched. Passing taxis threw sheets of water over the sidewalk. The rain fractured the light from the sulphurous streetlights and glare-white headlights without seeming to spread it very far.

Wet through already, Buffy turned away and set off again.

Patrol was worse than usual. It seemed there was a new demon around every corner, although even most demons weren’t bloodthirsty enough to want a fight in this weather. They were as hunched and shuffling as the people on the bridge, miserable in the wet, and all the fights were half-hearted and perfunctory. Still, they came on endlessly, and Buffy felt like she was sleep-walking through an ocean, as if she stood still while water and demons were blown past her in a ceaseless stream, and she turned and kicked and staked with numb hands and numb brain.

The Watchers had her carrying a digital camera now, to help with demon identification, and Buffy obediently snapped photos of all the demons she killed, at least until the camera became either too cold or too waterlogged to turn on anymore. She didn’t get home to a hot shower until almost three in the morning.

When she got into bed, it was with an anxiety that had recently become familiar. She was hoping so hard for one of the dreams that she was worried it wouldn’t come, and the fear and anticipation together kept her awake. Tossing and turning, she shivered under the covers – out of some kind of weird superstition, she always kept the window open now, as if having the rain closer would help. Chills marched up and down her clammy spine, but she felt smothered and sweaty under the blanket. Finally, she gave up, wrapped the comforter around her shoulders, and padded down to the living room couch.

Giles was there, sleepless, sipping a mug of tea in the warm light of the lamp on the end table. In the surrounding darkness, the room felt cavernous and ancient, almost primeval. Buffy moved a tangled skein of mahogany-coloured yarn out of the way and sat down next to him, then rested her elbow on the arm of the couch and buried her head in the crook of it.

“What’re you doing up?” she asked. Her muffled voice came out gravelly.

“I was _attempting_ ,” he said, in a tone that would be testy if it weren’t so utterly unsurprised, “to get in contact with Faith in Cleveland. She hasn’t submitted a report in ten days.”

“No luck?”

“Twenty-four rings and an automated hang-up. Four times in a row. It appears she has not set up her voicemail. Either that,” he said, and paused for a sip of tea, “or she’s avoiding me rather effectively.”

“Mm. That sounds like Faith. Kicking demon hiney? Check. Twisting tough guys around her little finger and breaking them like dry twigs? She’s your gal. Paperwork… punctuality… not so much.” Buffy wasn’t sure what she was saying. The words belonged to someone else. She was so _tired_. She would never not be tired. Her whole body hurt. Miserable, she sniffed wetly, and then groaned.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Giles asked kindly, and she shook her head without raising it. Her still-damp hair shifted, cold, over her back.

“Here,” he said, and she looked up to see that he was passing her his tea. “Drink this. It’s chamomile, I’m afraid. How was patrol?”

“Think I broke the camera,” croaked Buffy. “Too wet. I left it in your study.” She was so exhausted that colours broke and reformed behind her eyes whenever she closed them. The living room was floating. When Giles moved, the motion seemed dreamlike and unreal. He put the back of his hand against her forehead, and she closed her eyes. His hand was dry and warm. It made her feel even colder.

“Hm,” he said, moving his hand to the back of her neck and letting it rest there. Then, nodding to the tea, “Finish that. Have you got class in the morning? Well,” he corrected, checking the clock, “later this morning?”

“Afternoon,” Buffy rasped. “But I have to work on my poetry paper.”

“You need sleep, Buffy,” he said gently. “You’re making yourself ill. You’ve done a fine job this semester. I’m – I’m very impressed. I can help you with your papers, if you’d like. Copy-edit, provide comments, whatever you need.”

“Thanks,” Buffy muttered, abandoning the tea to once more bury her face in her arm. Head spinning, she watched the waves of blackness surfing up again and again behind her eyelids with every shiver. _This shaking keeps me steady…_ She’d read that poem out loud to Spike last week in a dream. He’d heard it before once, he said, but he couldn’t recall where. _All I remember’s it was in a library. Little shithole of one. Smelled of old cheddar. Think I ate the librarian. You know,_ he’d reconsidered, _maybe it was her that smelled_.

They’d been lying on the hard pavement in the middle of the main downtown drag, right in front of the movie theater. Buffy had sat up to read the poem. _Listen_ , she said, and Spike shut his eyes and listened – listened, she could swear, with his _feet_ he listened so hard, and not a breath of wind stirred, and no birds flew, and the sun was shining so single-mindedly she thought it was listening too.

Buffy wanted to smile, remembering, but her face muscles were too tired, and the head-spinning galaxy blackness was rushing over her again – if _only_ , she thought, if only the world really _did_ disappear when she shut her eyes, just until she decided to let it be born again – and she mumbled into the cold dark of the living room, “but Spike’s helping me.”

Giles’s hand froze on the back of her neck, and only then did she realize what she’d said. “Buffy…” he began. Behind the one word, she could hear his brain whirring: Had she cracked? Was she hallucinating? Was it some psychotic coping mechanism?

“It’s – it’s nothing, Giles,” she said quickly, then coughed once. “It was just a dream. I promise, I’m not crazy.”

Maybe he didn’t quite believe her, but he didn’t say anything either, and a few minutes later, Buffy, drifting, felt the cushions shift, felt her legs lifted onto the couch, caught a glimpse, as the lamp was switched off, of the dark misty charcoal light diffusing through the rain outside the big front windows. Distantly, she felt her comforter being tucked tight around her, and the sound of Giles settling into the wingback armchair he favoured, and she struggled to open her eyes, to tell him that he should head up to bed –

– but when she finally got them open, she was lying in the grass in the UC Sunnydale quad, shivering in a patch of white sunlight.

Nearby, Spike sprawled under a tree, reading her book. He flipped it in her direction. Without budging, she let it land in front of her. She still felt chilly and sniffly and _tired_ and achy and awful. Closing her eyes, she tried to burrow into the ground, which smelled of sun-baked earth and sweet grass. Now that she was actually here, all Buffy wanted was sleep, real sleep, just a few hours of oblivion. The idea of doing more schoolwork even in her _dreams_ was torturous.

“Go on, then,” said Spike. Buffy cracked an eyelid. He’d pulled another, slimmer volume from the inside of his duster and had his nose buried in it. “The thing’s not going to read itself, now is it?”

“No,” groaned Buffy, taking a breath to add, “don’t want to.” But the breath caught on something in her throat, and instead she coughed hard a few times, a dry, dusty cough that, like everything else in London, she didn’t think would stay dry for long.

“Lovely,” said Spike. “Look, if you’re going to die of pneumonia, could you do it further away? ’M trying to read here.”

“It’s your stupid city,” groused Buffy, pushing herself upright. “I haven’t been dry in weeks. D’you know all my leather jackets are ruined? And the _shoes_ , Spike. It’s been a shoe-pocalypse. And Giles won’t even _try_ to sound sympathetic! But get one of his books a _little_ damp at the edges and it’s forty-five minutes on the history of book-binding, and the life of Sir Writes-a-Lot-of-Stupid-Books-That-Dissolve-In-Water and _Why don’t you have any respect for knowledge, Buffy_ , and _I’d have thought your current field of study would have taught you the value of the book-as-object_.”

“Mm,” said Spike, flipping a page.

“And I think it’s just a cold. I’ll be over it in three days. Four tops.” Slayer healing wasn’t quite as effective against viruses as it was against fang-marks and infections, but it didn’t hurt. Buffy glared at the Roethke book on the grass, with its stupid lavender border and abstract watercolour cover art. She only had thirty pages or so left, but for the moment, neither hell dimension nor flood-high water could convince her to open the damn thing. “Don’t I get a sick day?”

Without looking up, Spike asked, “Have you finished your _Middlemarch_ essay?”

Buffy winced. “Um, almost?” In truth, she had a detailed outline and all her quotes were picked out. All that was left was to actually write the thing. Which _totally_ counted as almost done.

“Then no,” said Spike.

“What are you,” she asked, pausing to snuffle, “my Biblical taskmaster?” She pouted, which was less than totally effective because Spike was still absorbed in his book. “I just want to lie down and close my eyes.”

Spike sighed, checked his page number, and laid down his book. “Fine, fine. Toss it here. What page?”

Buffy settled down again in the sun, lying on her back. It was strange to be here like this and not hear any birds rustling in the tree overhead, no scuttling of squirrels in the leaf litter. Though she was grateful for the lack of ants. She closed her eyes, letting the bright sky burnish the backs of her eyelids. From Spike’s direction came the sound of pages turning, little noises of him rearranging himself against the tree. Then he began to read.

His rough voice was surprisingly well-suited to it. His tone smoothed out; some of the rougher edges eased away; the g’s he habitually dropped found their way back to the ends of their respective words until every utterance sounded whole, complete. And he knew how to read poetry: not too slow, but giving time for each phrase to have a little room around it, like a hollow in the snow, and every word falling like a stone dropped into a still pool. Buffy let herself drift, listening. There was a long poem about birds, as if Roethke were reading her mind from beyond the grave, and she listened to his sounds.

_“Peripheral dippers come to rest on the short grass,  
_ _Their heads jod-jodding like pigeons;  
_ _The gulls, the gulls far from their waves…”_

_Peripheral dippers,_ Buffy repeated to herself, but silently, because she didn’t want Spike’s voice to stop. He moved onto the next poem.

_“What does what it should do needs nothing more.  
_ _The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.  
_ _We come to something without knowing why.”_

Surprised into interrupting him, Buffy said, “That sounds exactly like the poem I like. _I learn by going where I have to go_. Wasn’t this like a decade later?”

Paper rustling: Spike was flipping back and forth to check the dates. “Yeah. Eleven years. Why’re you surprised? Who people are, what they care about – none of that changes.” She heard the duster shift, its heavy leather sound like thick cardboard. She could picture him resettling his shoulders, a half-shrug. “People like to lie to themselves, say that they can change. But no one does. Not really.” Buffy was about to say something, and he must have sensed it, because he added, “Gettin’ a soul’s a special case.”

“But Roethke did,” Buffy said slowly, musing. “He changed. All these later poems I’ve been reading – it’s like he figured out how to escape. He can get out of himself now. By being in love, and also… it’s like he’s worked out how to commune with nature. How to… disappear into the world, I guess. He gets himself out of his head. And his body. I mean… there’s no more rotting imagery. All the nature stuff now is about light and stone and clear water. There’s fewer plants. And there’s not that trapped feeling anymore. Like, what’s that quote – _Wherever you go, there you are_?”

“That’s not a quote, it’s a bloody cookie fortune.”

“Fine. Whatever, it’s true. Only – only Roethke found a way around it. He found a way to join into something… outside himself. Something bigger. And – and then, his later imagery, it’s all about things that are, um…” She thought for a second, looking for the right word. “ _Impermanent_. Water, and light, and the seasons, and – and birds, and the delicate parts of flowers. Not the roots or the shoots, or the soil.”

“The essence of things, you mean. Their spirit. Not the heaviness of their bodies, but the… soul of them.”

Buffy looked at him sharply, but didn’t call him out. “Yeah. Exactly. It’s like he realized how precious and fragile everything is, and it becomes…” This was hard, putting her thoughts into language. None of the words she normally used seemed right. They were all imprecise, and it seemed important, somehow, that she say all this stuff _exactly_ , just how she meant it, or else there was no way Spike would understand what she was getting at. Casting about for a phrase again, something Winslow had said last week in class popped into her mind. “Unutterably beautiful.”

“You going to put that in your paper?”

“Yeah,” said Buffy. “But I don’t want Edwards to think –” She hesitated. “To think I’m stupid, like you did, for the ‘wherever you go’ thing. There’s got to be a better way to say it.”

All Buffy could hear for a few minutes was the air going in and out of her lungs. Through her nose, her throat, pooling in her chest. It was louder than it should have been.

“ _The descent to Hell is the same from every place_ ,” said Spike.

“Huh?”

“It’s Anaxagoras.”

“What’s Anax – Anzagoras?”

“ _Anaxagoras_ ,” Spike said impatiently, enunciating. “Old Greek blighter.”

“Aren’t all Greek blighters old by default?” asked Buffy, and immediately moved on. “I don’t think that means the same thing I said.”

“Sure it does,” said Spike. “The guy hates being stuck as himself, right? At the beginning, at least. So he’s in hell. Only it’s not a hell you _go_ to. He carries it with him. So no matter where he is, getting there is always the same.”

“Oh,” said Buffy. “I guess I can make that work.”

“You _guess_? C’mon Slayer! Admit it, that was bloody brilliant, that was.”

Even as miserable as she felt, a sly grin tugged on Buffy’s lips. “It was all right.”

“What, I don’t get any points for being able to pull Greek quotes out of thin air?”

“It was in English,” Buffy said, turning her head on the ground to look at him. “Not Greek. And I told you, I’ve stopped being surprised by you. You should take it as a compliment.”

“You know what I take as a compliment? _Compliments_.”

“That’s why you dated Harmony, isn’t it?” asked Buffy. Her voice came out phlegmy and rough, as if it’d been scraped against a cheese grater. “ _Oh Spikey, you’re so brave! You’re so_ smart _, because I can’t read and I think Hermes is a fashion company and Paris is named after Paris Hilton! Oh Spikey, you’re so_ hot _and well-muscled_ –”

“Shut it,” Spike groused, and threw a twig at her, but not very hard. Grinning, Buffy turned her head back to the sky, which was blank and blue as the breast of a parakeet.

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” he said quietly. When she half-sat up to look at him, propping herself on her forearms, he had his nose buried in the book again, searching for the right page, and didn’t return her gaze. Slowly, Buffy lowered herself once more and let her eyes fall closed.

It seemed to take forever for Spike to find his place, and Buffy felt herself becoming heavy and drowsy. Under the California sun, she was finally warm again, and it felt like bliss to just drift in the soft air, in the tenderness of a quiet summer. Spike was silent so long that she had almost fallen asleep when he finally began to read again in his gentle poetry voice, which sounded like a boat slipping down a stream.

“ _I met her as a blossom on a stem  
_ _Before she ever breathed, and in that dream  
_ _The mind remembers from a deeper sleep:_ ”

Buffy cracked one eye open. “I’ve read this one already.”

“I _know_ ,” said Spike, his voice suddenly back to its craggy, irritated self. “Did I not tell you to shut it?”

“But –”

“Just close your eyes and listen, would you?” he said testily, and Buffy shrugged and did as he said. After a moment, Spike went on, and she let the sound wash over her, until it no longer sounded like individual words with meanings but one long silk scarf of sound, lifting all her limbs, and drowsing dark the space behind her eyes, making her light and buoyant as the sky.

When Spike finished the poem, he went onto the next, which also sounded familiar. This was from a section called _Love Poems_ , she recalled, one of several sections called that. Remembering this woke her up a little.

“ _In a lurking-place I lurk,  
_ _One with the sullen dark.  
_ _What’s hell but a cold heart?  
_ _But who, faced with her face,  
_ _Would not rejoice?_ ”

His voice had gone soft and reverent. Buffy opened her eyes.

Across the little patch of green lawn going brown at the edges, Spike looked at her, a long golden look, and she felt trapped, frozen in the searchlight of his eyes, like all the air had turned to glass. Suddenly, desperately, she wanted to touch him, to let him know without words that she understood that he was telling her something, telling her the thing that she hadn’t dared to ask because she was scared, or because she didn’t have the right – but he was telling her anyway, generously, like a priest giving an impulsive benediction. All this, she wanted to convey to him with the language of her palms against his, the language of her muscles, which, unlike every other tongue, had never failed her; but she couldn’t move.

And then they both did, although not toward each other. Something – something in the windless, completely empty town – was moving. They noticed it at the same time: motion across the quad, near the residential buildings. In another moment, it had cleared a line of shrubs and showed up clear against the pinkish granite of the dorm.

A Turok-Han.

“How did it _get_ here?” whispered Buffy, before remembering: dream. _She’d_ brought it here. Or her subconscious had, anyway.

“No idea,” muttered Spike. He slid the book back inside his duster. They were both upright now, and had somehow migrated to stand shoulder to shoulder. “Feeling up to a spot of violence?”

But Buffy shook her head. “I can’t kill those things bare-handed. We need weapons. A blade, a dowel, a chain. _Anything_. The gym, maybe?” She nodded toward the squarish building, half-hidden behind one of the dorms.

At that moment, the übervamp sniffed, and its head came up: they’d been seen.

“Go!” yelled Spike, and they were off, the übervamp in lumbering but unnaturally fast pursuit. They burst through the door with only a few seconds’ lead and darted across the empty lobby, leaping over the student ID–activated turnstiles.

“Where to?” asked Spike, looking up and down corridors of white-painted cinderblock.

“I don’t know!” said Buffy. “I’ve never been here!”

“’Course you haven’t,” grumbled Spike, and tore off down a hall. Halfway along, he picked a doorway at random and barrelled through.

They were in a studio for fitness classes. Wooden floor, two steel columns in the middle of it. At the back of the room, yoga mats, blocks, and straps were haphazardly shoved in cubbies that topped a row of cabinets; a rack of free weights stood by the full-wall mirror.

“Perfect,” said Buffy, and in one motion grabbed a twenty-pound weight off the rack and swung it directly into the face of the übervamp as it followed them through the door. Recovering fast, it snarled and went for her arm, forcing her to release the weight. In the same instant, it snapped the back of its ugly hand against her face, hard enough to send her flying into the mirror, which shattered into a Buffy-shaped dent around her.

Damn, how had she forgotten how _strong_ these things were?

Spike was rifling through one of the cabinets. Finding nothing useful, he tore off the cabinet door and broke it over his knee until he had a piece with a passably sharp point. With a roar, he threw himself at the Turok-Han’s back as Buffy defended herself desperately, pressed up against the broken mirror. Spike’s stake lodged between the vamp’s shoulder blades, unable to penetrate to its heart. It didn’t even slow the thing down.

“That’s not going to do it!” yelled Buffy, who was duly punished for her distraction by being whipped around and thrown against the door.

“Well, we needed _something_ , didn’t we?” asked Spike through his fangs, holding onto the übervamp’s arm as it raised its hand to crush Buffy’s windpipe. Turning, it punched Spike in the throat, and he flew backward – straight into a metal column. His head whipped back against the reinforced steel. He crumpled into a heap at its base.

“Spike!” yelled Buffy, but he was too stunned, or too injured, to respond. Struggling upright, Buffy saw that the übervamp had turned again, impossibly quickly, and it caught her punch, forcing her arm up and back against the door. With her other hand, Buffy tried to get a few fingers into its eyes, but it had anticipated her. It struck with its fangs, and at the last moment, Buffy pulled her punch.

But the vamp was faster: its fangs slipped into her skin and dragged as she moved her arm, drawing two scratches from the inside of her elbow to the outside of her wrist. Gasping, Buffy kept up the pressure with her caught punching hand. It had all been distraction, anyway. Her foot had been questing along the floor, and she’d just found what she’d been looking for.

With one quick motion and a grunt of effort, Buffy hooked her toe under the bar of the twenty-pound weight and swept it upward into the Turok-Han’s chin. Roaring, it stumbled a few steps in retreat, and she leaped, tackling it backwards onto the wooden floor. Their combined weights forced Spike’s improvised stake farther in, all the way to the heart. The vamp dusted beneath her.

The whole thing had taken no more than forty seconds.

Buffy, lying on her forearms and aching everywhere, groaned, inhaled vamp-dust, and coughed several times, phlegmily. She heaved herself onto her back and stared up at the ceiling tiles. “Spike?” she hacked, and heard an answering groan.

“Yeah,” he said, painfully. “All right, Slayer?”

“Ugh.”

The squeaking of leather and a few stumbles: Spike was getting to his feet. “Don’t fancy having to do that again,” he said. “Hey Slayer, mind dreaming up a few axes next time? Hell, I’d settle for a –”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of citations on this one. First, all Roethke poems quoted in this chapter, beginning with the chapter epigraph and proceeding in order: "[The Renewal](https://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=1&poet=37&poem=2094)," "[Epidermal Macabre](http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/18.html)," "[Give Way, Ye Gates](https://poetryoem.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/theodore-roethkes-give-way-ye-gates/)," "All Morning," "[The Manifestation](https://missmarymax.tumblr.com/post/13544198336/the-manifestation-theodore-roethke)," "[The Dream](https://knightleyemma.com/2014/08/10/dream-roethke/)," "[All the Earth, All the Air](https://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=1&poet=37&poem=2103)."
> 
> Roethke's "greenhouse poems" can be found in his 1948 book, _The Lost Son and Other Poems_ , but many of them are also scattered around online. For anyone who may be interested, here are a few: "[Transplanting](https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2003%252F05%252F18.html)," "[Root Cellar](http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/theodore_roethke/poems/16315)," ["Cuttings" and "Cuttings (later),"](http://bourguignomicon.blogspot.com/2011/10/cuttings-and-cuttings-later-by-theodore.html) "[Weed Puller](http://www.divasofverse.com/2015/10/weed-puller-by-theodore-roethke.html)," "[Orchids](https://songofamerica.net/song/orchids/)," "[Forcing House](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/10/05/forcing-house)."
> 
> Anaxagoras is quoted in a biography of the Greek philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, _The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers_ , which was written (in Greek) in roughly the first half of the third century AD. Diogenes [records](https://books.google.com/books?id=_7I0AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=%22the+descent+to+hell+is+the+same+from+every+place%22&source=bl&ots=akstz4it5e&sig=ACfU3U2YqvRiBvpIV8-Y_sPXlqs-f-EdyA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjV2pztp6HmAhWQ1FkKHWGvA38Q6AEwBnoECAsQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22the%20descent%20to%20hell%20is%20the%20same%20from%20every%20place%22&f=false) that "[Anaxagoras] comforted a man who was grieving because he was dying in a foreign land, by telling him, 'The descent to hell is the same from every place.'" Sounds like a nice guy.


	10. Chapter 10

_The sleep was not deep, but the waking is slow._

\+ + +

For a minute, Buffy had no idea where she was.

Her mind was still stuttering with adrenaline from the fight with the übervamp, but her body felt heavy, listless. She must have been drugged. Her vision wasn’t working right. There were familiar shapes around her – chairs, curtains, lampshades – but they seemed to jump around, attached to nothing, as her eyes darted across the room in panic. It all hit her retinas as separate entities; nothing matched up with anything. Why was she so confused? Where was Spike? He’d been saying something about weapons. There was rain, so close it seemed like she was in it, only she wasn’t wet.

God, why did her body feel like it had been hit by a truck?

Then her gaze landed on Giles, sitting in his armchair, and everything clicked. She’d been dreaming. She’d woken up. She was in the living room, in London, and it was raining outside, and Giles, it seemed, had only moved to get dressed and collect a new cup of tea. He was frowning down at a pile of books in his lap; the top volume was open to a page of squiggles. She shifted on the couch, and he glanced up and peered at her with a gentle look of sympathy and care.

“Mm timezzit?” she mumbled.

“Nearly noon.”

“You let me sleep,” she managed through a yawn. The world was beginning to reassert itself. All the furniture came to rest on the floor. The strips of curtain rearranged themselves onto the windows; the room reassembled itself; the rain receded to the outside.

Tentatively, Buffy tried sitting up, knocking the skein of yarn off the top of the couch in the process. Her arm still hurt viciously, a raw, messy, spreading pain like a toothache. Maybe it had fallen asleep and that was why she’d dreamed of it being injured.

“I tried to wake you two hours ago. You wouldn’t wake. I figured you needed the rest.”

“Probably,” Buffy said, clamping her left hand hard over her right forearm to see if that would help.

“Do you want any lunch? I believe Willow is cooking up some of those frozen potstickers you seem to love so much. How many boxes have we gone through in the past fortnight? Seven?”

“They’re good. You should try them sometime. Otherwise you’re going to wake up one day and you’ll have turned into a man-shaped… _demon-thing_ made of shepherd’s pie and Yorkshire pudding and –” Buffy underwent an age-long yawn – “mu-u-ushy peas.” Her ears popped, pressure resettling in her sinuses. “And your hair will be – um, mashed potatoes. You’ll have potato hair. It’s true. Things like that happen around me, you know.” A sudden twinge in her arm nearly made her gasp. What was going _on_ with it?

“Buffy,” Giles scoffed, “ _please_. As if I eat Yorkshire pudding.”

“Eh,” shrugged Buffy with one shoulder, “take a potsticker allowance out of my salary, then. ’M going to shower.”

Awkwardly, with her blanket around her shoulders and her left hand still squeezing her right forearm, she shuffled out of the room and hurried up the stairs. As soon as she got to her room (freezing cold – maybe she really _should_ consider keeping the window closed), she threw off the comforter to look at her arm.

There were two parallel fang scratches running from wrist to inside elbow.

She stared at them, flummoxed. It was a _dream_. She hadn’t actually fought an übervamp because she hadn’t _gone_ anywhere. Giles had been sitting with her almost the whole time she’d been asleep, and he’d said he’d tried to wake her earlier. So she’d still been here, in London, in Grimmauld Place. In her body.

But there were the scratches. It was real.

She finally admitted what she’d known for a long time but couldn’t bring herself to hope for: the dreams weren’t dreams. Not entirely. They didn’t even _feel_ like dreams. They were so much clearer, sharper. Longer. So much more logical. They felt like life – but clearly they weren’t quite that, either. Buffy closed her eyes and pictured Spike in the white-hot daylight on the quad, or in the library, the sun shining on his skin. Not life, then. And not dreams. Something… something in between. Something real.

If it was real, then Spike was still out there. In some way. In some world.

In some world, he was alive.

Buffy blew out a long, slow breath. Was it a world she could get to? She didn’t understand how her dreams could be both real and not real.

This called for backup. This called for Willow.

Groaning, Buffy let her head thump back against her closed door. It was Tuesday. Willow would be at Slayer Central, doing her weekly morning seminar about all things Magick. Buffy was _not_ going to bust in there and talk to Willow about this in front of Kennedy. She was going to have to wait until this afternoon, while Spike loitered alone in dream-Sunnydale.

For the first time, Buffy thought about what he did while she wasn’t there. Did he wander through the town alone, walking down the middle of the streets in the fake sunshine? Did he sit in the empty house, or in the cool silent crypt, watching the TV flicker with static snow? No wonder he’d spent so much time in the library. Buffy’s heart twisted for him, for the unrelieved loneliness of his death.

For the moment, though, she had to put it out of her mind. If she couldn’t talk to Willow yet, she might as well go to class – and any longer standing here, thinking, would make her late.

Her arm was still bleeding sluggishly. After a quick shower, she inelegantly but securely wrapped it up, hiding the resulting white bandages under her baggiest sweater. All of her jackets were still wet through; nothing in the house seemed to dry anymore. Dawn would probably yell if she found out Buffy borrowed any of her stuff, and Willow’s jackets were all too tight in the sleeves. At the back of the coat closet, Buffy found a painfully British oilskin mackintosh of Giles’s, which came down to her ankles and swallowed her hands up whole. She rolled the sleeves twelve times, popped the lapels, cinched it around her waist with a red belt, and called it good enough.

Well worth it, too: the wind gusts had fallen back to an occasional frustrated mutter, but it was still spitting rain. Overhead, the sky was a sanguinolent bruise-purple, as though violence had been done to it. Under her umbrella – the red one from Giles’s bank – and the long jacket, Buffy was satisfactorily dry, but her nose was running non-stop by the time she got to class. She sat in the back, in an unoccupied row, but the boy in front of her began sending her glares at every wet sniff. She tried to sniff more quietly. The whole hour was spent tracking the progress of languid dull chills up and down her spine. It took a full ten seconds for her to realize class was over, and she was by far the last one out of the room.

Her Brit Lit class was in the English faculty building. As she shuffled miserably past the department’s administrative office, Winslow emerged from the doorway, a canvas messenger bag strap across her chest. She was precariously juggling a stack of grading on top of an irregularly shaped package that looked as though it might contain several books.

“Oh, it’s Buffy, isn’t it? Hold on a second…” Winslow tried to transfer all her stuff to one arm, managed the papers, bobbled the package, and lost control of everything. Student assignments, printed readings, and pens of various colours spilled over the ground. For a moment, Winslow and Buffy both regarded the mess with something between dismay and exhaustion, and then Winslow shrugged and began rifling through her bag.

“Someone left something in my box addressed to you. Must’ve known you were in my class… This is good, running into you, wasn’t sure how I was going to find you in lecture tomorrow… aha! Here it is. Final paper going all right, then?”

“Yeah,” said Buffy, as she reached out automatically for the yellow mailing envelope. _Buffy Summers_ was scribbled on it in black Sharpie. “Yeah. I’m writing on _Middlemarch_.”

“Wonderful!” said Winslow, and seemed to mean it – _Middlemarch_ , she had admitted, was her favourite of the books they’d covered this semester. “I look forward to reading it. Now if I can…” She looked at the snow of papers across the floor. “Damn…”

Together, they collected everything into an untidy pile and, carrying it carefully between hands and chin, Winslow wove her way down the hall. As soon as she was out of sight, Buffy tore open the package, mystified by what it could be. A love note? An extortion attempt? A prophecy in a demon language? All would be equally bad.

But when she overturned the envelope into her hand, what came out was a slim chapbook, very old, with worn green covers. _A Few Figs from Thistles_ , they blazed, _Edna St. Vincent-Millay_.

More confused than before, Buffy turned it over, then flipped it open. Only then did she realize that a notecard had been stuck between two of the pages near the back.

_Buffy, hoped this might offer a bit of comfort – one thing poetry can always provide. It tells you, as I will now, that you are not alone. S. Edwards_

On the page behind the notecard, he’d marked a poem in red pen. A sonnet, Buffy realized.

_I think I should have loved you presently,  
_ _And given in earnest words I flung in jest;  
_ _And lifted honest eyes for you to see,  
_ _And caught your hand against my cheek and breast;  
_ _And all my pretty follies flung aside  
_ _That won you to me, and beneath your gaze,  
_ _Naked of reticence and shorn of pride,  
_ _Spread like a chart my little wicked ways.  
_ _I, that had been to you, had you remained,  
_ _But one more waking from a recurrent dream,  
_ _Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,  
_ _And walk your memory’s halls, austere, supreme,_  
_A ghost in marble of a girl you knew  
_ _Who would have loved you in a day or two._

\+ + +

It wasn’t until long after dinner that Buffy was able to catch Willow alone. She knocked on her bedroom door, opening it at Willow’s muffled, “Come in!”

Willow was sitting on her bed on top of the covers, reading a book with some kind of sigil on the leather cover. She smiled widely when she saw it was Buffy, and Buffy felt a pang of remorse at how absent a friend she’d been recently.

“Hey Buffy! What’s up?” Willow scooched over to make room, and Buffy sat cross-legged on the bed facing her. A few bits of varicoloured yarn were lying on the bedspread, and Buffy picked them up and wound them through her fingers for something to do with her hands.

“It’s kind of complicated.”

“Like…” Willow sounded cautious. “Magic complicated or… boy complicated?”

“Maybe – maybe both?” Buffy said. “I’ve, um, been having these dreams. About – about Spike.”

Willow closed her book, keeping one finger between the pages to mark her place. “Buffy,” she said, voice full of compassion, but Buffy pressed on, trying to get all of it out at once.

“Except I don’t think they’re really _dreams_ ,” she said, and she explained all the dreams she could remember, and the conversations she’d had with Spike – how he’d been the one to discover why the gash in her leg wasn’t healing, and how the fight last night had left a mark on her this morning. She pushed up the sleeve of her hoodie and unwound the bandage to show Willow.

“So it got me thinking – it’s real. It has to be. At least in some way. I mean, I know I wasn’t really _there_ , because Giles would have noticed if I disappeared, but Spike, and that version of Sunnydale, they _exist_. I mean, look.” She waved her healing arm in front of Willow, who was looking decidedly unconvinced.

“Buffy, I know that you… well, you obviously miss Spike, and – and I agree, it would be nice if he hadn’t, you know, had to make with the kablooey, but – but there could be all sorts of explanations. Maybe you cut it on something in your sleep, or –”

“I know, I know. But they don’t _feel_ like dreams, Will. You know how you can tell the difference right before you wake up? You know that you’re dreaming, and as soon as you think, ‘Oh, it’s a dream,’ you’re awake. That doesn’t happen. Because it exists. He’s out there, somewhere, and we have to find him, as soon as we can. We have to rescue him.”

“Oh! Oh, whoa.” Willow clearly hadn’t anticipated where the conversation was going.

“Please, Willow. For me. I know you hate him, and God knows he’s given all of us enough reason, but… He’s all alone.”

For a few minutes, Willow said nothing. Buffy left her to it, because she was obviously thinking hard, tapping the spine of her book against her pyjama-clad leg. Finally, she said hesitantly, “Buffy… if it really is him, and he’s real –”

“He is.”

“– I’m totally on board. Sure, he’s not my favourite person, but if _you_ don’t hate him, what gives me the right? Plus,” she added, somewhat contritely, “he did save the world. And you. And me and Dawn and Xander and Giles. And – and also my girlfriend. We… kind of owe him one. But it’s just…”

“Yeah?” Buffy’s stomach twisted in knots. If Willow refused to help, she didn’t know who she’d go to. With her lousy research skills, trying to find Spike on her own – while awake – would probably take up even most of _his_ lifetime.

“There’s no rush, is there? I mean, he’s a vampire. Creature of the night. You know? Those of the sneaking-in-shadows, yellow-eyed solitary predator variety? I’d think he’d at least be enjoying his holiday in the sun. And the quiet. No annoying Scoobies to bother him? Being alone… I mean, it was kind of Angel’s whole deal,” she said, with an apologetic wince for bringing him up.

Buffy took a calming breath. A familiar flash of anger had erupted in her, like a demon, one with horns that lived inside her, and flayed her with its spiked tail. Willow wasn’t being argumentative on purpose, she reminded herself.

Or was she? Her rationale was pretty flimsy. And none of Buffy’s friends had _ever_ liked or trusted Spike. In Buffy’s mind, he’d proven himself beyond the shadow of a doubt; but she suspected that, for her friends, the fact that he’d saved them all didn’t change who he’d been or what he’d done before. There could be no clean slates for him, not when he’d accumulated so many black marks on his record. Maybe Willow was looking for an excuse, any excuse, to talk Buffy out of her rescue plan without appearing to.

Or maybe Buffy was being unfair. She bit her tongue and wrestled her anger down again, back into the magma chamber that always roiled inside her chest.

“Angel was all soul-having and self-torturing,” she argued, trying to keep an even tone.

“Well… kind of confirming my point there,” Willow said, brows raised.

“Spike’s not exactly the kind to beat himself up about the past. Even with a soul. What I mean,” Buffy said, as patiently as she knew how, “is that Angel made a _choice_ to be by himself in order to _be_ miserable, because vampires are naturally pack animals. Usually it’s for safety. And hunting tactics. But for Spike…”

Buffy considered. She’d never given much thought to Spike’s psychology before, to what made him tick. He’d just always _been_ there. If she’d thought about it at all, she’d assumed it was the normal things: blood, sex, violence, the fight, the hunt. Her. “I think it’s something more. I mean, think about it. He never lived alone as a human.”

“How do you know that?”

Buffy shrugged uncomfortably. “He told me. And then he ran with Angel and Darla and Drusilla as a vampire. Remember how excited he was when he came to Sunnydale and first saw Angel, thinking he could get the gang back together? And he was _evil_ then. He always had at least Dru. And as soon as he lost her, he joined up with us.

“Even when he was crazy,” she went on, slowly, “and as self-torturing as he ever got, he had all of Sunnydale to choose from. I mean, come on, the place was, like, _heaven_ for a lone vampire. Tons of sewers and tunnels and nice homey abandoned nests, plus generations of mausoleums. And what does he pick? The basement of the most populated building in town. He _has_ to be around people. It’s like even being with people he hates is better than being alone. Spike being alone is like… _me_ being alone.”

Willow was watching Buffy with a mix of confusion and pity, like maybe Buffy was crazy, but, if so, it was because she’d cracked under a great strain and should be treated with care and regretful respect. Maybe cinched very gently into her straitjacket and fed organic apple juice through a straw. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s like… _I’m_ supposed to be alone, too, aren’t I? I’m just as much a creature of the night, lone predator type. One girl in all the world. But I have you. I have Giles, I have Xander. I have Dawn,” she said with finality. “I made myself a family. I fought for that. I still do. That’s what Spike does, too. That’s all he wants. Where he is – that’s not rest. That’s torture.”

Willow shifted, looking uncomfortable. “I… see your point.”

Buffy let out a long breath of relief. “So you’ll help? And – and you won’t tell anyone? Not yet, anyway?” She already knew what Xander would say – he’d hated Spike from the get-go, and that thing with Anya had calcified his hate into granitic loathing veined with rage. And Spike was one topic on which she didn’t trust Giles, either. It would be better if she could face both of them with all the information – or, even better, with Spike back already, and the argument moot.

And there was Dawn to think about, too. As much as she’d claimed to hate Spike that last year, Buffy knew how deeply she loved him, and she couldn’t bear to get her sister’s hopes up. If it turned out that Spike was actually dead, or beyond their reach, only one of them should be heartbroken.

Willow nodded. “I promise. I’ll poke around and see if I can figure out what’s going on. If I can’t suss it out on my own, I’ve got my regular Sunday night mind-link with the coven. I can ask some sneaky questions, pick a few brains on the down-low.”

Impulsively, Buffy hugged her, her face pressed into her best friend’s bony shoulder. Willow smelled of tea and sage and candle wax, a familiar smell, and Buffy felt her eyes tear up with love and memory. “Thanks, Will,” she whispered.

“Buffy,” said Willow, hugging her back, “if he comes back, what are you going to do? Do you, you know… want him? As… more than a friend?”

“I want him back,” said Buffy, choosing her words carefully. “I want him _here_. That’s all I can think about right now. After that… For once, maybe, we’ll have time.”

\+ + +

Reluctantly, Buffy had allowed Kennedy and the girls to take up patrol duties while she was sick, since even walking up the stairs made her feel like a rhino was sitting on her chest, and maybe wiggling its ass around for good measure. But two days later, as soon as the sensation of weight had shrunk from rhino to particularly chubby gnu, she got back to her usual routine: short outings to check the graveyards with a few of the trainees, followed by full-length solo patrols all over the city.

Clerkenwell. Brixton. Whitechapel. Hyde Park. Clapham. Putney. Buffy was becoming familiar with them all. With the way the streets in Chelsea echoed after two o’clock, with the wild sound of the bare trees in Battersea Park howling in the late wind, with the hollow look of the desperate crew of drug addicts in stretched, tattered, fourth-hand Aran sweaters who huddled in the brickwork tunnels beneath Vauxhall, and the bands of demons that stalked them from the shadows.

The demon problem was getting worse. London was full of alleys and tunnels and hidey-holes, unmapped rooms and condemned houses and boarded-off Underground tunnels, abandoned bomb shelters and dry crumbling crawl spaces, and still Buffy couldn’t believe there was room for all the demons she encountered. They seeped like black water from the walls at night, the city bursting with them at the seamy places.

Many were harmless, but more weren’t. Patrol had become a ceaseless battle, ending not when Buffy had run out of foes, but when they retreated of their own volition from the earliest commuters and the new day’s first shifts of construction crews. If they retreated at all. There was a sudden rash of deaths in all-but-deserted Underground stations, business workers in sober suits heading in early to the office to prep for meetings found mutilated or bloodless on the grimy tile. Taxi drivers saw a corresponding uptick in demand. Word had gotten out, rumours of growing crime and an unsafe season.

Buffy couldn’t afford to let up; even the two nights she’d been off sick had resulted in extra work once she’d returned, Kennedy being both less experienced and slowed down by her trainees. It had gotten so bad that not even a few days of drier weather helped keep the demons underground. Saturday and Sunday night, no rain fell – which was good for a Slayer tromping from Chiswick to Kensington to Covent Garden all night, though slightly less good for the progress of her dream-dependent homework. Still, Buffy knew even that slight relief wouldn’t last for long: the sun never even teased an appearance, and the clouds swirled, heavy and ominous, as if only the barest chance were holding back more rain.

Early Monday morning, with a damp cold wind auguring the impending return of stormy weather, Buffy finally dragged herself home sometime after six in the morning. Sunrise was still more than an hour off, but morning rush hour was now safely underway. Quietly, so as not to wake Dawn and Willow – Giles was an early riser, and if Xander wasn’t up for work already, he would be soon – she shut the front door behind her and leaned against it. With wry resignation, she examined the wreck of what had once been a top-of-the-line digital camera.

There was light spilling out of the living room, and the hum of voices. Wondering if Giles had called an early-morning Watcher meeting about the budget or something equally tedious, Buffy wandered in that direction to guiltily report the destruction of equipment. Not that it was her fault. Like, really, what did they _expect_ her to do when three vampires rushed her in a smelly dumpster-lined alley and the closest thing she had to a garrotte was the camera cord? Was it _her_ fault she’d been tackled to the pavement just as the vampire beneath her had dusted, resulting in direct lens-to-concrete contact? If the Watchers hadn’t worked room for a few spares into the budget, they only had themselves to blame.

But when she walked into the living room, Buffy saw that _everyone_ was there. Not only Giles and the Watchers, but Willow, Xander – dressed for work – and even Dawn, wearing pyjamas and –

“Hey!” said Buffy. “That’s _my_ silk robe!”

“What, like you’re ever here at night to wear it?” retorted Dawn.

“That’s… okay, that’s a fair point.”

“Also,” added Dawn, scrunching up her nose and scooting farther from the door, “you smell like garbage.”

“Um,” said Cynthia, pointing at the crushed piece of plastic and metal in Buffy’s hand, “what happened to our camera?”

“Garrotting incident.” Buffy shrugged, then tossed the remains of the camera to Cynthia, who fumbled it spectacularly. “Bill me.”

Trying to get a clue about what was going on, Buffy sent a questioning glance at Giles. He was replacing his glasses on his nose with a gesture she knew well, and when he looked back at her, his expression she likewise knew, all too well. A terrible knowledge – not of what was coming but of the fact that she would have to meet it. Softened by the faith that she would do it and succeed, a faith grounded in love. Softened, too, by a warm sympathy that never offered to become pity, and an absolute trust, and an enduring strength, the strength of mountains, the strength that wore _through_ mountains.

Buffy loved Giles more than family, and one of the things she loved most about him was his absolute refusal to surrender. Knowledge that would bow another man’s shoulders only straightened his spine. He was at his best in a crisis. From his steady gaze, she looked to Willow, who was sitting square and straight with her jaw struck forward, to Xander, who from beneath his eyepatch gave her a ready little quirk of the mouth and a nod, to Dawn, who stood up with a long-legged grace, and crossed her thin arms purposefully. All of them shared a long look, of love and shared history, and Buffy felt resolve settle in: resolve and something else, something like joy. They were sure of each other. The certainty bore them all up like air. For a moment, they all shared an absolute conviction, with one mind and a single exultating heart: _We’ve got this. Let’s do it._

Finally, Buffy turned back to Giles, who was nearly smiling. “Okay,” she said. “Go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epigraph is from Roethke's "[The Gentle](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00144940.1969.11482849?journalCode=vexp20)"; the Millay poem is Sonnet II from "[Four Sonnets](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44722/four-sonnets-1922)."


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which questions are answered! Some questions. A few questions. Okay, look, a finite subset of questions are answered, all right?

_which is almost_  
_what I know of heaven: that it’s hushed  
_ _and I’m not in it._

\+ + +

“Last night, I finally heard from Faith,” Giles began. “She hadn’t reported in because she was overwhelmed by an odd – and quickly rising – number of demons. Few of which were local, and many of which were unidentifiable.”

“It’s not just here, then,” said Buffy. “It’s not isolated.”

“No,” said Willow. “The coven spent the night linking to sisters in Massachusetts, Texas, Peru, Ghana, Malawi, Spain… uh, Romania, Russia, Indonesia, and Australia.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “It’s everywhere. Worse here than anywhere else, though.”

“That’s ’cause we’ve got me,” said Xander. “I _draw_ demons. It’s my hot bod. They’re powerless to fight it. I’m like demon catnip.”

“It’s true,” confirmed Dawn. “I think a Zorblick asked him out last week.”

“Yes, well, Xander’s unfathomable allure aside,” said Giles – “Hey! I resent that!” said Xander, and “Resent it all you want, you’ve still dated more demons than Buffy,” said Dawn, and “ _Excuse me?_ ” squeaked Buffy – “ _If we could all stay focused_ – yes. Thank you. The coven has confirmed with their sister groups that the same energy signatures Willow picked up after your fight with the, er…”

“Captain Hook weirdos.”

“Ah, quite,” said Giles. “The same energy signatures have been noticed elsewhere.”

“The inter-dimensional kind of energy,” clarified Dawn. She had her serious research-face on, the one that made a little vertical frown line appear between her eyebrows.

“Yes, precisely.”

“The thing is,” said Willow, “with more eyes on it, we were able to figure out what’s going on. Something – or someone – has destabilized the barriers between dimensions. They’ve gotten weak, and in some places they’ve kind of run right through each other, like two bubbles hitting each other, but instead of popping, they… merge and become one big bubble of… specialness.”

“Aw,” said Dawn.

“Does there need to be a justice of the peace for this process?” asked Buffy wryly.

“I believe we’ve wandered from the point,” said Giles. “Whatever is causing this effect has thinned the walls between the dimensions to the point where demons can simply walk through. And not always intentionally.”

“So the demons coming in,” said Buffy, “they’ve been walking through the dimensional _walls_?”

“Yep,” said Willow. “Like… little doggies walking through pet flaps on the back door. Okay,” she admitted quietly, when everyone only stared at her. “Bad analogy.”

“All right,” said Buffy. “So who’s responsible for whatever bad mojo’s causing this?”

“That!” said Willow, pointing at her. “That is an _excellent_ question. Because then you know, we can go… get the gang all together and… collect weapons and go fight the baddie and save the world like, you know, like we… do…” Seeing Buffy’s amused look, she trailed off.

“You have no idea, do you?”

“Not a one.”

“So we wait, right?” asked Xander. “Buffy does her patrol thing, you and the coven keep with the magicks, Giles and the Watchers get all Watcher-y and find the mastermind and then Buffy goes and, you know, makes him dead?”

“Ideally,” said Giles. “But I’m afraid it’s more complicated than that. We’re concerned that the damage to the dimensional walls is now so severe that the erosion process has become self-sustaining. With a limited natural supply of mystically energetic material, the resources required to – to mend additional ruptures will, will only further strain the boundaries. It seems likely that the damage will continue to propagate – accelerate, in fact – without assistance.”

“Uh, translation?” asked Buffy.

Dawn rolled her eyes. “The walls have gotten so stretched out from healing over the tears they’re starting to rip by themselves, and the more they do, the more they’ll stretch, so the thinner they’ll get, and the more they’ll rip, and… badness.”

“So if we wait too long,” asked Xander, “the walls’ll tear completely?”

“It’s a very real possibility,” said Giles. “Every dimension would be open to every other. Absolute chaos would ensue.”

“Like what Glory was trying to do with Dawn.” Buffy looked over at her sister, who was wearing a mask of expressionlessness. Buffy reached out and stroked her hair, like she used to when Dawn had been young, and upset, and in need of comfort. This time, Buffy wasn’t sure which of them she was trying to soothe.

“Exactly,” said Willow.

“Man,” said Xander. “Think of all the female demons I’d have to fend off with a stick.”

“So what’s the plan?” asked Buffy. “Will, can we stabilize the walls? And if we do, can we still track the source?”

Willow nodded. “We can try to slow it down. But it’ll just be a Band-Aid. The good news – well, sort of – is that whatever’s causing it will still be there, so we can try to home in on it.”

“How long will it take?”

“Stabilizing the dimensions? We can work something up by this afternoon.”

“Do it,” said Buffy. “Work with the coven, stop the bleeding. Giles, you know what to do. Research. What kind of demon, magic, hell god – whatever – could be doing this, and how.”

“Ooh, can I help?” asked Dawn. “What can I do?”

“You can get ready for school.”

“But – but – apocalypse!”

“It’s still only a forecast. No apocalypse days until there’s actually ash on the ground,” Buffy said firmly. Dawn pouted but said nothing else. “Xander – do me a favour and brief Kennedy.”

“Uh,” said Xander, “can I crawl through the London sewers butt-naked as demon bait instead?”

Buffy’s lips twitched. “She needs to get the girls ready. And then you’re on weapons duty. Sounds like things are only going to get worse. We may need to be creative.”

From face to face, friend to friend, Buffy saw only resolution and steadiness. No fear. “And do it fast,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like stabilizing these things is going to give us a lot of time.”

As the meeting broke, she glanced around at the Watchers rimming the room, most of whom looked shell-shocked at the speed of the decision-making process.

“First apocalypse,” Dawn said to her, shrugging. “Beginners.”

“What are you going to do now?” asked Giles. He looked at Buffy sternly. “Sleep, I should hope?”

Buffy shook her head. “I’ve got two classes later this morning. Sleep will only make me groggy-Buffy.” Maybe she could start writing her Roethke paper. She’d finally finished the _Middlemarch_ one over the weekend. Even the thought exhausted her. “But I’d _kill_ for a mocha.”

“I’ll tell Pat!” said Dawn. “He bought that new espresso machine. He’s not great at using it, though.”

“Right now, I’d settle for chewing on the coffee beans and a chocolate bar,” Buffy told her. A whiff of eau-de-garbage wafted up out of her clothes as she turned toward the door. “And a shower.”

On her way out, she caught Willow by the sleeve. “About my… other thing. The dreams?”

“I’m sorry, Buffy,” she said, eyes pained. “I couldn’t find out anything this week. Well, I got some research done and I have some theories – there’s something called a semi-rooted isolate dimension that – well, anyway. I had planned to talk it over – subtly, you know? – with the coven last night, but Faith called in as soon as you left, and we’ve spent the night on this…”

“It’s okay,” said Buffy, though she had to make an effort to unclench her jaw first. Now that she _knew_ Spike was out there, she felt an urgency, a desperation even, to get him back _now_ , even though he’d been gone for six months, and a few more days couldn’t hurt.

“As soon as we’ve gotten the walls shored up,” said Willow. “I _promise_. I’ll figure it out, Buffy. We’ll get him back.”

From somewhere untouched, somewhere beneath the exhaustion and the dampness, beneath the bruises and the anxiety, beneath the doubts that she’d be able to save Spike and the loneliness of London and the fear of what was coming and whether she’d be able to stop it and the niggling knowledge that she was two days behind on her final papers, Buffy dredged up a smile.

“Thanks, Willow,” she said. “I know we will.”

\+ + +

Fortified by two strong mochas (Cynthia had heard the commotion when Pat broke down in frustration and starting yelling at the espresso machine – from the upstairs bathroom, Buffy caught “hideous demonic device” and “I bet the steam comes directly from a hell dimension!” – and it turned out she knew her way around a steam wand), Buffy managed to power through the first five hundred words of her Roethke paper (“‘ _Love alters all’_ : Embodiment and the Soul in the Works of Theodore Roethke,” by Buffy Summers) before she had to leave for class. The mochas sustained her through a seemingly endless lecture on Swift, but wore out halfway through Winslow’s discussion of surrogate action in _Our Mutual Friend_. By the time she made it back to Grimmauld Place, Buffy was practically sleepwalking. As she stumbled through the front yard, the last leaves clinging to the trees were turning over violently, twisting themselves in eagerness to escape into the freshening wet wind.

In the front office off the foyer, Willow and Giles had paused halfway through setting up a ritual circle. Willow held an armful of purple candles, and Giles was fussily checking the arcane symbols drawn with red sand in the middle of the room. The two of them were deep in a technical debate about the finer points of the dimension-stabilizing ritual, the gist of which escaped Buffy entirely as she zombie-lumbered past the doorway on her way to the stairs.

Willow broke off halfway through a sentence that contained the words _vibrational correspondence_ and _mystical energy perturbation_ to call her name. “Hey! How was class?”

Without stopping, Buffy only grunted, dragging her backpack on the floor behind her.

“Oh – um. Okay. Uh, have a good nap, I guess? We’re going to do the ritual in an hour or two. Is – is that okay?”

Buffy flapped her hand in a vague gesture of assent and started the endless tromp up the stairs.

Safe in her room, she collapsed face-down on the comforter. The last thing she heard as she tumbled headlong into sleep was the tapping of rowan twigs on the windowpane, and the gentle patter of water droplets on the glass.

It had begun, again, to rain.

\+ + +

As soon as she saw him, Buffy punched Spike in the face.

“ _Ow!_ ” His hand came up to cup his nose. “What the bleedin’ hell was that for?”

They were outside the high school. Buffy wondered, briefly, what Spike had been doing there, but she had other things to worry about. “You’re real, you asshole!”

“Uh, _yeah_! How come I’m the one gettin’ punched for that? What d’you think I’ve been tryin’ to _tell_ you for months, you daft bint?” Over the fingers pinching the bridge of his nose, Spike’s glare was spark-blue and furious.

“Well, you haven’t been trying very _hard_ , have you?” Buffy said. “You let me think I was dreaming you to – to make me feel better, when all along I could have been trying to figure this out, I could have found you, I could have –” She broke off, but Spike finished her thought.

“Could’ve what?” he asked. “ _Saved_ me? That it?” Snarling, he let go of his nose and stalked over to her, right up in her face.

“Newsflash, Buffy: I’m. Dead.” There was a little blood oozing from his right nostril. His face was chiseled into bitter lines. Cold was radiating off him. “Little late to be savin’ me.”

Buffy shoved him back a pace. “You’re not. It’s _not_.”

Spike snorted, shaking his head. A little more blood sprayed from his nostril. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. “Same old Slayer. Everythin’s all about you, innit? You’re feelin’ _guilty_ , that’s it.” He jabbed the air with the tip of an accusing finger and then pushed farther, hard into her sternum, right on the bone. “’Cause I died savin’ all your skins, and _you_ couldn’t do it. Now Spike’s gone, so better go rescue him – all so _you_ feel better ’bout me dying. You tried to fix it before I died by sayin’ you loved me. But I didn’t believe you. Know why? Because it’s always been the same with you, Buffy. Then and now. It’s always been all about _you_.”

He was back in her space, his face an inch from her own. With iron-tight hands, he gripped her shoulders, so hard she could feel each finger digging in. When he went on, his voice was quieter, but no less intense. “What I did, I did because it was good. The _only_ good thing I ever did.” He paused. “Let me keep it, Buffy. Let me have died to save the world. Let me have died. Let me be dead.”

Buffy brought her arms down on his wrists, breaking his grip. “No.”

“Argh!” Spike turned half away from her in frustration, hands clenching on air above his head. “ _Why_?” he asked, and Buffy strode one long step forward, took his face in her hands, and kissed him.

It wasn’t pretty. The kiss tasted like copper and blood and cold desperation, and she wielded it like a punch, and Spike kissed back like a blow. Their mouths mashed together, violent and needy, and Buffy couldn’t get close enough. She gripped his ears and tugged, hard enough to hurt, and then his arms came around her, squeezing too tightly, so that breathing was painful and difficult, and her bones creaked together as if she were fragile. And suddenly she couldn’t get enough, she couldn’t let him go, couldn’t bear to, not if it crushed her.

 _Geryon knew he must not go back into the cloud_ , she remembered, dizzily _. Desire is no light thing._

She released his ears and tunnelled her fingers into his hair, and the pressure of his arms relaxed until one hand was holding her firmly, secure, safe, and the other was touching her everywhere: gently stroking the side of her face, brushing away her hair, alighting briefly on the back of her neck, her arm, her chin, which he held lightly and angled, so the kiss turned sweet and slow, and Buffy could pull a hair’s breadth away from his mouth to breathe, her forehead cradled in the curve between his eyes. She moved her hands again, swept the pads of her fingers over his sharp cheekbones, traced his mouth, felt the soft velvet of his eyelids, the lashes tickling her skin as they fluttered.

“Don’t be dead,” she whispered, her own eyes still closed. “Please don’t be dead.”

“Buffy,” he whispered, and she felt his mouth move under her fingers, “Buffy,” just her name, and it undid her.

“ _Sung me moon-struck,_ ” she told him, “ _kissed me quite insane_ ,” and then she buried her face in his neck and said into his collarbone, “ _I think I made you up inside my head._ ”

“No,” he said, and kissed the crown of her head, his arms back around her. “No, love. No.”

For a long time they stood like that, and Buffy felt her lips, pressed to the cool skin of his neck, throbbing. When had she last kissed him?

Before the soul. It must have been. The night Riley had come back?

That couldn’t be right. That was years ago.

All their kisses had been violent, back then. Like this one had started.

Old patterns. _What falls away is always_.

Finally, Buffy managed to take a half a step back. She scrubbed the heel of her palm across her eyes. “Why didn’t you try harder to tell me?”

Spike shrugged helplessly. “And what good would it have done, you knowin’ I’m real? ’M still dead, Buffy.” This time his voice was gentle, resigned. “Even if you could have found me, what then? You and me both know: Resurrection never turns out well.”

“For _me_. In case it’s escaped your notice, Spike,” Buffy said, as tartly as she could, which wasn’t very, because her voice was shaking, “you’re not exactly in heaven.”

Running one hand through his hair, Spike turned away. He paced a small circle. Paused. Buffy waited. After a moment, he said, eyes on the ground, “How do you know? ’M a vampire, Buffy.” With an effort, he looked up at her. “A killer. Drank the blood of the innocent. Embraced violence. Sowed mayhem. Death. And I liked it. God help me, but it was _fun_.” He paused. Swallowed. “They don’t _make_ heavens for creatures like me.”

Spike tilted his head back, blinked, let the sun shine on his face for a moment as if it were his benediction and his doom. “I should be in hell, by all rights. Should have just kept burnin’ up. Maybe this –” He gestured to the empty town, the sun, the shimmering heat, the pale sky and the browning grass – “maybe this’s as close as I get to heaven.”

Buffy’s heart turned to a coil of barbed wire in her chest. “No, Spike.”

He still looked at her, anguished. “How do you know? _How do you know?_ ”

“Because you’re alone.” Buffy stepped toward him again, reached up and gripped his neck with her thumbs on his jawbone, directing his face toward hers, so that he had to hold steady and look her in the eye, so that he’d _have_ to hear her. “That’s not heaven, Spike,” she said, softly, telling him exactly what she’d told Willow. “That’s torment.” Helpless, she let her own face fall against his for a moment, and, hesitantly, his hands came up and stroked her hair, as if to soothe her, as if she were the one in need of comfort.

Something finally penetrated her turmoil of emotions, and she pulled back a little. “What happened to your face?”

“What – oh.” Spike reached up and prodded at the reddish bruise that spread from his left temple to his cheekbone – not where she’d hit him. “More übervamps.” He looked at her sidelong. “You were gone for a bit.”

“Weather’s been dry the last few days,” Buffy explained, distracted, eyes tracing the path his fingers had just travelled. “ _More_ übervamps? It’s been getting worse here, too?”

“What d’you mean?”

Buffy explained about the porous dimensional walls, about the demons walking through the tears like doggie doors. “We don’t know who the baddie is, but Willow and the Devon witches are doing a spell today to stabilize things for a bit so we can track him down and do our thing. Maybe _this_ ,” she realized, excited, “is just a different dimension! It _has_ to be connected. Our demon problem, your demon problem – it’s got to be the same thing making them worse!”

“Dunno,” said Spike doubtfully, “but it’s why I was headin’ in there.” Spike’s hands were still tangled in the hair above her nape; he lifted one and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the high school. He nodded toward something on the ground, and for the first time Buffy noticed an axe and a sword lying there. He must have dropped them when she appeared. Or when she punched him. Buffy winced, chagrined at the memory. “Was goin’ to see if that’s where they’re all comin’ from. If it opened up again.”

“Right,” said Buffy, dropping her hands abruptly from his leather-covered shoulders. She walked past him and hefted the axe. “Lead on.”

Spike rolled his eyes, plucked the axe from her grip, and replaced it with the sword. Buffy huffed and followed him, pouting at his back, through the front doors.

But as she crossed the threshold, the world seemed to jump around her, like a startling horse. She stumbled. “What –?”

Everything – the school, the grass, the trees on the lawn, even Spike – was vibrating like a bad picture on a ’50s TV, and there seemed to be a kind of blueish veil over her eyes. It wasn’t quite _blue_ , just kind of weirdly thick, like when the Captain Hook demons had –

Oh. Oh no.

“Spike!” she yelled, reaching for him, but everything shook again, and she fell. And then Spike was there, saying something, but there was a noise like high winds all around them, though the front doors of the school were closed behind them and the trees she could see through the glass were absolutely still in the breathless summer.

“The spell!” he yelled in her ear. “It’s Willow’s spell – it’s stabilizing the walls, but you’re not really here. If it finishes and you’re still with me, you’ll be stuck halfway between!” He clutched her forearm hard, pulled her up and ran, dragging her behind him.

“Where are we going?” she yelled. They were on the stairs now, Spike yanking her onward.

“You have to get back!”

“Not without you!” she said. “I’m not going without you!”

“You’ll find a way back,” he assured her, blowing past the top floor of the school and through an unmarked door onto a flight of metal stairs painted industrial gray. They burst through a fire door at the top and onto the roof. Buffy could barely see now; all she could sense was a lot of harsh, bright light reflecting off the concrete surface behind the shifting veil of the disturbed dimensional wall. The winds in her ears were louder than ever, like a tornado, like a train coming. She dug in her heels.

“I’m not leaving you!” she yelled.

Spike stopped and faced her, hands on her shoulders again. His face was an oval smear of white with two blurry circles of blue. “You can come back for me,” he said, fast and intense. “You’ll figure it out. But if you don’t go now, _neither_ of us’ll ever get out.” He began towing her across the roof.

“What are you doing?” she shrieked, and then, as he propelled her up onto the ledge at the roof’s edge, she screamed, “Spike!”

“It’s a dream, right?” he said, frantically, as he spun her around to face him. “We were both right. It’s real, but it’s also a dream. _You have to wake up_. Do you trust me? Buffy, _do you trust me_?”

“Yes,” she whispered, though she couldn’t hear herself. “Yes.”

Spike kissed her once, hard, and she clung to him, leather bunched in her fists –

He pushed her off the roof.

Air hurtled past her head, and Buffy could sense the ground rushing toward her, and she turned her face, and the ground was only six feet away, four feet – she flinched – just inches, and –

\+ + +

Before she was even aware she’d woken, Buffy was out her bedroom door and flying along the upstairs hallway, clattering down the stairs to the foyer, her heart pounding in her throat, racing, and she exploded into the front office, where Willow was sitting cross-legged in the middle of a circle of purple candles with her eyes closed, chanting along with many female voices, though only Giles was with her in the room, and –

“STOP!” screamed Buffy –

“– _mend all tears and all holes fill; let the worlds once more be still!_ ” chorused all the voices, Willow’s loudest, and the candles flared up into a painful brilliance, until their flames touched the ceiling – and then everything snapped back, something behind the air that Buffy hadn’t even noticed before suddenly slotting back into place. She thunked to her knees in the doorway.

She was too late.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epigraph today is from a poem called "Minutes of the minutes" by the wonderful contemporary poet Bob Hicok. The poem is in his 2010 book, _Words for Empty and Words for Full_ , part of which is concerned with working through his feelings after the 2007 shooting that left 33 dead at Virginia Tech, where he teaches.
> 
> Familiar quotes from _Autobiography of Red_ , _Mad Girl's Love Song_ , and, of course, _The Waking_.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a slightly larger subset of questions is answered!

_The wind is soft above,  
_ _The shadows umber.  
_ _(There is a dream called Love.)  
_ _Take thou the fullest slumber!_

_In Lethe’s soothing stream,  
_ _Thy thirst thou slakest.  
_ _Sleep, sleep; ’tis sweet to dream.  
_ _Oh, weep when thou awakest!_

\+ + +

“Quick thinking on Spike’s part. The roof, I mean.” Willow. She sounded sad.

There was a conversation going on around Buffy, but she was looking out the living room window, past the reflection of the lamps in the black glass, to the rain falling steadily in the darkness. Cars went by on the street, a constant susurration. People coming home from the office in their warm cars, taillights red haloes in the rain.

“You fall in dreams all the time,” Willow went on, “but you always wake up right before you hit the ground.”

“Do vampires even dream?” Xander. His voice was subdued.

“I suppose they must,” said Giles.

“I never asked,” said Buffy through numb lips. She touched them with a finger, trying to reignite how they’d felt mashed hard against his mouth, his devouring mouth, as agile and ruthless as the rest of him.

She’d lost him again. He’d been back, he’d been real, and now he was gone again.

But now everything was clear. She knew exactly what to do. It was as if her whole life here – not just Spike and Sunnydale, but London, King’s, Grimmauld Place – had been a dream. And now she was awake.

She didn’t feel defeated. She felt very sure.

Giles, Willow, Xander, and Dawn exchanged looks. “Buffy,” Giles began, taking off his glasses. “Ah – once we’ve sorted out what’s causing the – the dimensional perturbances, perhaps – perhaps we could, um, enlist the coven and see if – see if we can track down Spike. Perhaps, in time, we’ll be able to locate –”

“No.”

Buffy stood up.

“Willow,” she said. “We’re going to undo the spell, and find Spike, and bring him back. Now.”

“But –” Willow shot a look at Giles. “Buffy, messing with the dimensional walls like that, even more than we already have – we could cause serious damage! It’s like we built up a wall of sandbags. If we take them away suddenly… chaos will flood in.”

“Figure it out, then,” Buffy said, ruthlessly. “Figure out what’s causing the damage and find a way to fix it. A better way.”

“Buff,” said Xander, “I know you’re eager to get Spike back – not that I’m a hundred percent sure _why_ , because the guy’s an asshole –”

“An asshole who saved your _life_ , Xander,” Buffy snapped. “And yours, Willow, and Dawn’s, and Giles’s, and _all_ of us. He died doing it. He has a soul. He’s a _person_ , and he’s one of us and I –” Her voice broke. “And he’s trapped in an empty dimension by himself with übervamps attacking him. So _get over it_.”

“Um, say we can do it,” Willow put in tentatively. “Bring down the stabilizing spell, I mean. How… well, how are we going to find wherever Spike is?”

Buffy shrugged. “I’ll fall asleep. I always seem to dream myself there.”

“Yes, but we don’t know _why_ ,” Willow argued. “We don’t know if he really is real, or he’s a projection –”

“I _told_ you, it’s real. I got injured in the dream, and I woke up still injured.”

“Yes, but it may have just been in your mind,” said Giles. “A – a psychosomatic reaction. The mind can be extremely powerful in its delusions. It’s – it’s not unheard of for it to have physical effects.”

“ _Delusions_?” Buffy repeated, incensed. “So now I’m delusional?”

“No, Buffy, that’s not what we’re saying,” protested Willow. “But we can’t just go taking down the support spell willy-nilly without a plan to stop the walls from weakening catastrophically. We don’t even know what’s causing the damage!”

“Er,” said a voice, “I may be able to help with that.”

In unison, they all turned toward the doorway.

“Um,” said Charlie. “Hi.”

\+ + +

“Buffy?” asked Dawn. “Who’s this guy?”

“This is Charlie,” said Buffy, wearily. “He goes to school with me. Charlie, everyone. What are you doing here?”

Giles was looking at Charlie very sharply. “To be frank, I’m more interested in _how_ you’re here. How did you get in?”

“The… door was ajar?” said Charlie. His face was bright red; his floppy straw-coloured hair, a tad too long, brushed the tops of his eyelashes. He shifted nervously from foot to foot, school bag on his back, umbrella dripping onto the rug, a sketchbook under his arm. “I’m sorry.”

“Dawn!” yelled Buffy, turning on her sister. “Did you leave the door open? It’s like minus ten outside!”

“Um, no?” tried Dawn. Buffy glared. “Well, maybe,” she revised. “Hey, I was distracted, okay? Pat and I were talking about _The O.C._!”

“Pat watches teen dramas?” asked Xander, horrified. “And to think I thought he was dignified.”

Giles, however, would not be distracted. “This house is supposed to be hidden from civilian eyes.”

“Aha!” Willow shouted, pointing at Charlie. “You’re a warlock!”

Charlie ran a hand through his hair. “I am,” he admitted. “But I came because I thought I could help. See, I always phone my Aunt Val on Mondays. She lives in Exeter and I don’t get to see her much during term, so –”

“Wait, Val Myers?” asked Willow. “From the Devon coven?”

“Yeah,” said Charlie. “That’s where I’m from – Exeter. In Devon,” he specified in response to the blank looks from the Americans in the room. “My parents both worked nights. Aunt Val practically raised me. So I call her every week. Just to check in, right, see how she’s getting on and all. She told me months ago that she was working with the Watchers’ Council, but not much else. Only, today she was distracted – she said something about a big spell having an unintended effect? And when I asked what was going on, she was so upset that she let slip Buffy’s name, and… well, here I am,” Charlie finished lamely.

“Well, thank you for the offer of assistance,” Giles said firmly, “but I’m sure we have everything well in hand.”

“Giles, it’s okay,” Buffy assured him. “Charlie’s good. Right, Charlie?” In response to her encouraging smile, he gave her an uncertain one of his own. “What’ve you got?”

“Well, er, ever since Val told me a – a few weeks ago about the increase in demon sightings, and the dimensional perturbations, I’ve been trying to track the source. Inter-dimensional mystical activity is a bit of a passion of mine,” he admitted. “And then… and then this weekend, I was wandering around at twilight with my sketchpad, trying to get inspired, you know? And a portal opened right in front of me. Lucky for me, the only thing that came through was a Pipkos.” He added apologetically, “I’m not much good in a fight.”

Xander looked at Charlie’s shrinking body language and round face, and said, “Yeah, I see that.”

Buffy stepped on his foot – hard. Xander whimpered. She ignored him, smiling again at Charlie. “I’m glad you’re okay. Please, go on.”

“Well, since I was there and all, I sat down quick and tried to see whether I could track where the portal had come from.”

“All that would tell you was where the Pipkos originated.” Willow was frowning. “Wouldn’t it?”

“Normally. But I figured it was worth a try anyway.” He shrugged. “And good thing, too. It was weird – like a propagating wave of energy had come through and ruffled the barrier between our dimension and the Pipkos’s, until the barrier split right open. So I followed back the propagation and I found a third dimension, a really little one. But there was something off about it. Like it’d been stuck in where it wasn’t supposed to be? It seemed – artificial. I know, that’s a weird thing to say about a dimension.”

“A bit, yes,” agreed Giles. He seemed to have forgotten his earlier misgivings; he was leaning forward in the armchair with his elbows propped on his knees, utterly fascinated.

“Well, that’s what it felt like, anyway. So I performed an astral projection and tunnelled into the dimensional kernel.”

“That’s… extremely dangerous, without an anchor,” said Willow.

Charlie grimaced. “I know. But I knew it was important.”

“What’s an anchor?” asked Buffy.

Dawn rolled her eyes. “Seriously, do you _try_ to forget everything Willow teaches you?”

“It’s okay, Dawn,” Willow assured her. She explained, “At the cosmic scale, spacetime works differently. Years can pass without you noticing. Or you can get lost in the dimensions and the spaces between them. An anchor is another witch or warlock who stays in their body in your home dimension and keeps a hold on you. Like with a thread, or a chain. Not a real one,” she clarified scrupulously, “a mystical one. Without it, you could get lost and wander forever.”

Buffy shivered. Lost between dimensions. It was a fate that sounded… cold. Laying down her life she could do. She’d done it. She’d do it again, if she had to. But the kind of sacrifice Willow was describing, the kind that Charlie had risked – that, she couldn’t imagine.

“Well, I made it back,” said Charlie. “I almost got sucked into the kernel, but when I came out, I had an image in my head. One image, very clear. The source of the problem.”

“All right,” said Buffy slowly. “So what is it? Or who? Chaos magician? Hell god? Overpowered warlock who wants to suck magic from other dimensions? Regular vampire with a hard-on for the end of the world?”

_‘I’m going to destroy the world.’_ Spike’s voice echoed in her head from half a decade and three hundred years ago. _That’s just tough guy talk. Strutting around with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is, I like this world._

Spike. She wished, desperately, for him. For his strong hands, the way they curled around an axe with joy, for his lean chest, solid, for his arms, swinging, for his heart, a lodestar.

“Er, no, it’s not a person,” said Charlie.

“Oh God,” groaned Buffy. “Don’t tell me I have to fight something non-corporeal again.” All these demons, demons everywhere and nary a Big Bad to hit? That would be the _worst_.

“Not quite.” Charlie fumbled with his umbrella for a moment and finally let it fall to the ground with a splashy clatter so he could take the sketchpad from beneath his arm. It was a nice one, with thick watercolour paper and a spiral binding on the top. He flipped to the last page he’d used and held it up. “Do any of you recognize this?”

On the page, sketched perfectly in Charlie’s sure lines of smudged and shaded charcoal, was the amulet Spike had worn on the last day in Sunnydale.

\+ + +

Downstairs, her friends and Charlie and the Watchers were nose-deep in books and mystical jargon. Dawn was right there in the middle of it. Buffy wondered – again – when exactly her sister had become a world-class expert on demonology, ancient languages, and dimensional energy.

Buffy herself understood only about one word in five, and most of those words were “it,” “the,” “a,” “dimensions,” “walls,” and various conjugations of the verb “to be.” This wasn’t her language. Hers was the language of the body. The hands. The silent language of swords and stakes. Buffy was fluent in violence.

She needed to be _doing_ something. Spike was out there, probably beating back übervamps with a stick and a prayer, in a dimension where time moved faster than their own, and it _killed_ her that they needed to do all this talking before she could go to him. That they had to wait, while her whole body was screaming, with all its sinews and strings: _Find him. Bring him home._

Since she knew yelling wouldn’t make anything go faster, Buffy had retreated to her bedroom to let everyone else work in peace. But she couldn’t settle to anything. She sat on the end of her bed, holding her Roethke book in her idle hands.

Maybe Spike was reading it too, at this very moment. Holding it made her feel connected to him. Close.

She flipped through it. This version only had half of the marginal annotations she’d made. The other half were in the version Spike kept in his duster in dream-Sunnydale. And wasn’t that a perfect metaphor? Like her handwriting, she was straddling two dimensions, half her thoughts and soul in each.

If they didn’t get this rescue plan right, she might end up stuck between dimensions forever. Or dead. Or maybe the world would descend into chaos and be overrun by demons.

At least then she wouldn’t have to write the rest of her essay for Edwards.

There was a knock on the door frame. Charlie stood there, holding two mugs of tea. Both were wrapped in snug knitted cosies, one striped red and yellow, the other hunter green and navy. Both looked surprisingly even around the edges, even if the stripes were a bit wobbly – Willow was getting better. Buffy thought of her knitting alone at night in the front office, unpicking failed stitches with a frown, all that careful work and attention. The image seemed to lacerate her heart.

“I hope I’m not interrupting.”

“No. Come in, please.” She scooted over a little on the bed, and he sat beside her, handing her one of the mugs.

“It’s spiced black tea. From Tanzania. Your, er – friend. Giles? He has an excellent tea collection.” Charlie nodded at the book in her hands. “Is that for Edwards’s class?”

“Yeah,” said Buffy. “Who are you doing?”

“Anne Carson,” said Charlie. “I really loved _Autobiography of Red_. Her other work is great, too. I don’t know much Roethke. Would you – would you read me a little?”

“Oh. Um, sure.” One-handed, Buffy awkwardly flipped through the book until Charlie held out a hand for her mug. Once she’d given it back to him, she was able to navigate the pages much better. She’d gotten to know the book pretty well by now.

She read him _The Waking_ , and then a couple of the short greenhouse poems so he’d get a sense of them – the life, the damp, the fetid death, the slick roots and green shoots breaking up through the rot. Briefly she explained the gist of her paper, her theory of Roethke’s evolution.

“He kind of saved himself, in the end,” she explained. “Like he got free of the muck and found – clear air. And… sky.” She’d been paging through the book idly while she talked, ashamed, somehow, of looking into Charlie’s face, like she was underdressed and overexposed. She landed on a passage she’d marked up; it illustrated exactly what she was saying, and she read it out to him.

_“I, who came back from the depths laughing too loudly,  
_ _Become another thing;  
_ _My eyes extend beyond the farthest bloom of the waves;  
_ _I lose and find myself in the long water;_  
_I am gathered together once more;  
_ _I embrace the world.”_

Buffy stared at the page a long time, not quite seeing it. Beside her, Charlie was silent, holding their mugs of cooling tea. She could feel him breathing, the life of him. Outside, the rain fell; the rowan tree waved its twig fingers. The rain. Hadn’t she been losing and finding herself in it? The water, the long stretch of it, reaching down from the sky. It had brought her back to Spike. Back to Sunnydale. It had made her whole. It had gathered her together. For a while, at least.

Charlie cleared his throat. “Willow is linking with the coven right now. They’re discussing how to drop the stabilization spell while you find your friend. Spike. Quite a number of demons will come through, so they’re – they’re planning for that. But it has to be done,” he said, as if to himself. “We have to get to his dimension. That’s where the destabilization is coming from.”

He was afraid, she realized. First apocalypse and all.

Not for her.

“I used to be dead.”

Buffy finally looked up at Charlie. He stared back silently, mostly expressionless. Maybe he thought she’d gone insane. He was the kind of boy who’d be too polite to say so.

Buffy let the book fall closed and took her tea back from him. “ _I, who came back from the depths_.” She huffed softly at herself. “I was dead. For a summer.” She took a sip of tea. It was strong, black, and still hot.

“What – what was it like?”

Buffy stared past the surface of the creosote-dark liquid in her mug. _What it had been like_ was something she’d tried, harder than anything, to forget. She’d driven herself far out beyond the bounds of self and sanity to forget.

She’d never, for a second, for an iota of a sliver of a _fraction_ of a second, been able to.

“It was wonderful. It was the most… miraculous thing I’ve ever felt.” She caught his eyes with her own. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

How many times had she said that, in those words or any others? Or with no words: with confidence and resolution. By picking herself up off the ground. She’d said it with her obstinacy and her calmness. She’d said it with violence. Her private language. _Don’t be afraid. I’m going to defeat the evil_. _I’m going to fix this. I’m going to make it all right._

Only now there wasn’t any evil to defeat. Just the world, shivering itself apart at the seams.

_Hold on, Spike,_ she thought to him _. I’m coming_.

_Don’t be afraid._

\+ + +

“Okay,” said Willow, “we know what’s going on. For real, this time.”

They were back in the living room, surrounded by mostly-empty pizza boxes and dirty tea mugs with dried drips down their sides. It was the middle of the night. Willow looked exhausted. Giles looked worse. One hand held his glasses loosely; the other, elbow propped on knee, pinched the bridge of his nose. He wasn’t getting any younger, Buffy realized. And he hadn’t harassed her about getting Spike back. Not a word. Suddenly overcome with love for him, Buffy walked to stand beside his armchair and laid her hand on his shoulder. Surprised, he looked up and gave her a tired smile.

All this time, and he could still smile to comfort her. He still tried.

It filled her with resolution.

“Hit me,” said Buffy to Willow.

“The amulet – the one that…”

“That Spike wore,” Buffy finished for her.

“Um. Yeah. It… messed with the dimensions.”

“‘Messed with’?” asked Xander through a mouthful of cold pizza.

“It’s what’s been affecting the walls, making them all – porous. And, actually, the weather hasn’t been helping.”

“What does the weather have to do with it?” asked Dawn. She should be in bed, Buffy thought, and then thought that that was another thing that didn’t matter.

“It’s the rain. An excess of water,” explained Charlie. “Running water, or falling water I suppose, is antithetical to magic. It rather… erodes it, like a river erodes sandstone. But generally, natural magic – like the magic maintaining the dimensional walls – is so strong that it’s basically immune.”

“Right,” agreed Willow, “but… whatever the amulet did – that huge release of power both here and through the Hellmouth – it’s turned everything… wonky. The rain’s been making the walls so thin that they’re tearing apart spontaneously.”

Buffy was frowning, thinking something over. “Still, why was the problem so bad _here_ , and not in California? Does the rain really make that much difference? It’s got to have been raining other places, too. That guy on the news last week said that the typhoon season is lasting an abnormally long time in Japan, right?”

“That’s the last thing,” said Willow, suddenly hesitant. “The reason the amulet’s been causing problems in the first place. Um. It… seems to have created a new dimension or two when it… you know, did its thing.”

“Closed the Hellmouth,” agreed Dawn.

“Crushed the übervamps,” offered Xander.

“Destroyed, oh, the entire town and everything in it?” suggested Giles.

“Um, right. Yeah. Dimensions come and go all the time, that’s natural. But the amulet did it by force. The mystical energy of that kind of magical violence sort of… clings to whatever’s nearby. Think of, um… a bomb exploding and releasing radiation into the environment, affecting everybody close by. And the radiation – the remaining energy – is still swirling around whatever or whoever it clung to, creating… um…”

“Structural instability,” Xander-the-carpenter supplied.

“Structural instability. So,” she went on apologetically, “the reason more demons are showing up here… It’s less of Xander being a homing beacon for skanky demon-hoes and more…”

“Me,” said Buffy. She dropped her hand from Giles’s shoulder. “It’s me.”

“Also – also us!” pointed out Willow. “And Kennedy. And – and the rain? But, um…” She winced. “Mostly you.”

Buffy felt her face twist. She turned away, blinking and staring hard out the window.

“You were near him longest after the amulet started to work. Longest and, um, last.”

“Boy,” Buffy said, “I’m just great at fixing apocalypses. I kill the Master but die in the process. We join together to beat Adam, the First Slayer almost kills you all in our dreams. I die – again – to stop Glory’s big plan, and mess up the Slayer line so that the First shows itself. Help _destroy_ the First, and destabilize all the dimensions. Yeah.” She breathed out, a half-amused huff through her nose. “Classic Buffy. Take something awful. Find a way to make it worse.”

“Buffy, no!” protested Willow.

“That’s not true,” said Giles.

“Yeah, Buff,” said Xander. “You’ve stopped the _world from ending_. Like, you’ve done it so often that I think you’re forgetting what a big deal it is. Every time you just mentioned, every single time, you saved us. All of us.”

“Yeah. Saved you from one apocalypse to throw you into another.”

“You know, so what, the Big Bads keep coming.” Xander shrugged. “We’ll keep doing it. That’s what we do. That’s what _you_ do.”

Dawn crossed the room and lifted both of Buffy’s hands in hers. She looked hard into Buffy’s face, and she said quietly, as if it were just the two of them, “Buffy. Badness always leads to more badness. You take it as it comes. And then you do what you can. You know that. You _taught_ me that.” She waited until she saw Buffy give the tiniest of nods, and then gripped her hands tighter. “Spike needs you. Go get him.”

Buffy nodded again, more firmly this time, and looked from Willow to Giles to Charlie. “What’s the plan?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's epigraph is from "[Dreams](https://poets.org/poem/dreams-3)" by Paul Laurence Dunbar.
> 
> Some dialogue quoted from 2x22, "Becoming: Part 2."
> 
> The Roethke poem that Buffy reads in part to Charlie is "The Long Waters." (If you happen to have a _New Yorker_ login, you can read it [here](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/06/02/the-long-waters).)


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little less conversation, a little more action…

_…and then one day when you least expect it, the perfect apocalypse, as quiet as a blooming…_

\+ + +

Buffy flipped up the collar of her coat and poked her head out of the archway, into the rain. Behind her, in the main entrance of Highgate Cemetery, Giles and Dawn were helping Charlie with his setup: a blanket, some herbs, a few candles. She could hear their voices fluttering up along the stones, whispering like bats in the arched ceiling. Amplified by the ancient acoustics, the rain roared in her ears. Drips shook themselves off the ends of bare branches above, falling fat and cold on the nape of Buffy’s neck.

Just outside, a few steps into the cemetery, Willow, Xander, Kennedy, and the slayer girls were milling around in the downpour, checking their weapons and reconnoitering their approaches. “Almost ready?” Buffy called, and Kennedy turned to give her a thumbs up. Miri and Shiv loped up and ranged themselves on either side of the archway.

“We’re your last line of defence, chief,” Shiv explained. Kennedy’s stupid nickname seemed to have caught on.

“We’ve got your back,” agreed Miri, and Buffy smiled at them.

“I know you do,” she said, and retreated back beneath the archway. Not that it helped much: a gust of gale-force wind whipped the rain horizontal, soaking everyone under the arch.

To Buffy, the rain was a relief. They’d been all set to go two days ago, but the weather hadn’t cooperated.

Their all-night planning session had lasted until the first intimation of light on Tuesday morning – but with the reluctant gray dawn, the rain had died down. All day Tuesday and Wednesday, the weather had been stubbornly dry. While across the rest of southern England, people breathed a sigh of relief, surveyed the damage to their homes and towns, and tried to dry out boots and coats and books and belongings, Buffy had chafed with near madness at the high, pale-gray sky and brisk cold.

Giles and Willow had teamed up on her, insisting that she pass the time by working on her Roethke paper.

“Giles, we might have an _apocalypse_.”

“And if the world doesn’t end,” he’d pointed out, “you’ll still have to hand it in on Friday.”

So, instead of battling hordes of demons like she wanted to, Buffy had spent the last two days sitting at the kitchen table next to Charlie, both of them armed with highlighters, books, notes, and endless mochas, tapping out three thousand words on mid-century North American poetry.

Only this afternoon had wet weather once again blown in. And, lucky for them, it was shaping up to be a true deluge.

“Right,” said Giles from behind her. “We’re set.”

Buffy adjusted her grip on the scythe, then made one final check of her other weapons: a belt full of stakes, sword at her side, dagger strapped to her forearm, garrotte in her pocket, knife in her boot. It seemed like overkill – she’d gone into the battle with the First with exactly one weapon, for Pete’s sake – but when the walls came down, anything might flood in. She wanted to be prepared. And she wanted extras for Spike.

Giles was dressed in the oilskin jacket Buffy had borrowed last week, carrying an axe, and wearing a permanently annoyed look on his face because the rain kept splattering his glasses. “Recap of the plan,” he said, just as Willow came trotting in from the rain. “Once more.”

“Giles –”

“To reassure me,” he said. “Please.”

Buffy rolled her eyes, but it was true that the timing was… delicate. To put it mildly. Over Giles’s shoulder, Charlie was waiting, listening. Dawn stood beside him.

“Willow mind-links with the coven and they pull down the stabilization spell,” Buffy recited. “Structural weakness will ripple through the dimensional walls. The witches will stay linked and try to focus all the weaknesses here at Highgate.”

“Why a cemetery?” Dawn had asked back at the house.

“Well, for one thing,” Giles had said, “it’s not likely to be very crowded after dark. For another, the barriers between worlds are always a little thinner in – in liminal places, crossing places. And, um, demons rather like cemeteries. If the walls do break down in other parts of London, the demons will be happy to choose a portal into a cemetery over their other options.”

With the rain pouring down over Highgate, Buffy continued. “Xander, Kennedy, and the girls will deal with the demons that come through. As soon as Willow and the coven have done their thing, Charlie will start up his spell. Giles and Dawn will guard him while he’s under.” Buffy would have preferred Dawn not to be involved at all, but she could admit that her sister had proven herself by now – and that making her stay home and wait for news would have been nothing short of cruel. And someone _did_ need to watch out for Charlie while he kept open a line between dimensions.

Charlie was going to be her anchor.

“What you’ve been doing is a kind of astral projection,” Willow had explained. “The amulet created a little bubble dimension, and you’ve been going to there with your mind, and your spirit. Your soul. Those parts will still go, but Charlie’s spell will let your whole body go through with them. That should let you take all of Spike back with you, too – mind, spirit, body, and… and soul.”

The goal was for Charlie to find Spike’s dimension, open a special portal that Buffy could walk through, and keep a mystical eye on her once she was there so he could pull her back when she was ready. But this part of the plan had been the hardest to work out.

“We can’t just kill the stabilization spell and wait for me to fall asleep so we can find the right dimension,” Buffy had said. “I mean, I know I’m sleep-deprived, but even _I_ won’t be able to nod off during a battle.”

“Drugs?” suggested Willow.

Buffy had shaken her head. “No good. If I’m taking my whole body to Spike’s dimension, I need to be in fighting shape when I get there.”

“Well,” said Xander, “we could… wait, no, that won’t work.”

There had been a few minutes of silence while everyone thought.

Then Buffy had stood up.

“ _The descent to Hell is the same from every place_.”

“Um,” said Xander. “What the what?”

“Great quote,” approved Charlie. “Who said it?”

“Some Greek guy,” Buffy said. “Like Pythagoras, only not.” She waved her hand impatiently. “I don’t know, I haven’t written that part of my paper yet. The point is I _always_ find Spike’s dimension. It’s like I carry it around with me. The entrance to it, I mean. Wherever I go, I’m _there_. Something must be pulling me there. Can’t we um, back-trace whatever it is?”

Willow had turned to Charlie immediately and, ignoring everyone else in the room, they broke into an intense discussion, thick with jargon, the conclusion of which seemed to be _yes_.

“It’s the flip side of you having magical radiation mixed up in your aura,” Charlie had explained. “Did you – did you touch, um, Spike while the amulet was working?”

“Yes,” said Buffy, and though her eyes were glued to Charlie, who was telling her that _it was possible, they could send her back to Spike_ , she saw Willow, Xander, and Giles all turn to look sharply at her. Swallowing, she held out her palm to show him. “Here.”

Charlie had nodded. “Mystical energy isn’t all that different from us. It wants to go back where it belongs. Makes sense, really, since we’re all made of mystical energy to some extent.”

“Well, some of us more than others,” Dawn had cracked.

Buffy had grinned at her, relieved. _They could do this_. “Right,” she’d said. “Now all we need is a really big storm.”

\+ + +

“Charlie will find the thread pulling me to Spike and open a rip in the dimensional wall, and I’ll walk through,” Buffy went on. “Then he’ll close it after me, but keep a line to me open.”

The rain had, somehow, intensified. Giles had to raise his voice to be heard over it.

“And getting back?”

“Spike and I find the amulet and destroy it at the same moment we tug on the line to Charlie.”

“ _At the same moment_ ,” Giles stressed. “It has to be _precisely_ simultaneous.”

“I _know_ , Giles. We’ve been over this, like, fifteen times.”

“We know you know,” soothed Willow. “But it’s important, Buffy. If you destroy the amulet before Charlie pulls you back, the bubble dimension will disappear with you in it. You’ll be stuck in dimensional Nowheresville forever. If you signal Charlie too soon, you won’t have time to destroy the amulet, so it and the bubble dimension will remain intact, continuing to erode all the dimensional walls –”

“And causing issues of the major apocalypse variety,” finished Buffy. “I know the theory. Satisfied, Giles?”

“Hardly ever,” muttered Giles. Then he paused. “That… came out wrong, didn’t it.”

“Yep, not going to touch _that_ with a ten-foot stake,” said Buffy. “All right party people, let’s light up the disco ball and get this rager started.”

Giles and Dawn took themselves off to the front entrance of the archway, ready for anything that might try to encroach on their flank. Willow pulled the hood of her raincoat up and ran back out the other way, past Shiv and Miri, into the cemetery. She leaped up onto a perch atop a grave monument, settled cross-legged in the rain, and closed her eyes. Below her, the slayers were silent, but it was the silence of concentration and readiness and patient waiting, not of nervousness. Buffy could practically sense the eagerness of their tense muscles, their hands clenched around weapons, their knees bent into a fighting stance that felt to their bodies like coming home.

Charlie was still standing beside her. He was holding her Roethke book. It looked slightly bedraggled; it had been impossible to keep anything totally dry during the trip from the house to Highgate.

“You’re _sure_ Spike will have a copy with him in the bubble dimension?”

“Positive,” said Buffy.

“The one that’s got all your notes in it?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, then. They’ll be linked. Just like we talked about.” Buffy nodded and smoothed her hands along the shaft of the scythe, preparing. Charlie walked to the other side of the archway and settled himself on his blanket against the side wall. “Buffy?”

“Yeah.” After a second, she glanced over to see him looking up at her from the ground, his three lit candles blown flat and fluttering in the wind. On his round, flushed face was an expression of hesitancy – but, beneath that, a steady determination.

“I’m looking forward to meeting him.”

Outside, in the rain, the first portal opened.

\+ + +

Charlie’s Spike-tracking spell took _maybe_ three minutes. The portal-opening spell, another two. By then, Kennedy’s girls were almost overrun.

Buffy looked on anxiously, shifting from foot to foot. Even though Charlie was doing something involving her aura, she couldn’t sense it. She felt normal, and she was desperate to help. Two more girls had joined Miri and Shiv at the entrance to the archway. Together they were holding the line – barely. As Buffy watched, looking past them to the main mêlée, she saw a scaly red demon with a long spiny tail pick up one of the slayers – the one with the green bandana – and throw her twelve feet in the air. She flew above the fray, arms windmilling through the rain, lit from beneath by the unholy light of magic and demon eyes. Kennedy ducked in and, with one swift swing of a battle axe, cut the red demon’s legs out from beneath it. Roaring, it went down.

Above it all, Willow sat on her perch, a look of painful focus on her face. She was surrounded by a blurry globe of white light that lit up the ground before the cemetery gates like a full moon, casting eerie shadows from scraggly tree branches and half-eroded grave markers.

Buffy’s place was out there, in the thick of that mess, laying about with fists and blade. She could taste it, it was so close – knew the way her heart would leap and settle, the smell of the blood and the quick fierce joy in trusting to the mindless strength of her body. Instead she was sheltered, behind the lines while others protected her. It burned.

“Buffy!” Giles yelled, and she turned, finding that one of the strange veils of thickened air had opened right in front of her. Through it, she could vaguely see Revello Drive. She sent one more agonized look at the fight, in time to see a slayer stabbed through the chest with her own sword. She gripped the hilt, surprised. Stumbled backward a step. Slowly, slowly, sank down to her knees.

Instinctively, Buffy gripped her scythe and took a step toward her.

“Go!” yelled Giles, and Buffy remembered where she was and what she was doing. The best way to help was to end this, fast. Destroy the amulet, stop the damage to the dimensional barriers, and let Willow and the coven sew up the holes. Quickly, she glanced at Charlie, who sat as solidly as ever, though his face showed evidence of strain.

Buffy stepped through the portal, and she was in Sunnydale.

She was on the sidewalk, outside her house. It was warm. The street was empty. The sun threw glare up from the sidewalk and made the pavement swim in Buffy’s vision. No sounds reached her of children or cars. A gentle breeze, soft on her skin, turned over the leaves on the trees and drifted a few strands of hair across her face.

Behind her, the portal closed, and the breeze cut off. For a moment, Buffy just stood there, trying to adjust to the brightness and the warmth and the silence after the chaos of rain and violence and night.

Then she heard footsteps rounding the corner of the street.

“Alley-oop, Slayer!” yelled Spike, sprinting past her, duster flapping. Behind him, just turning the corner, were three übervamps.

Buffy took off after Spike and caught up with him on the next block.

“They just appeared a minute ago,” he said. “’S been better for a bit, actually.”

“Willow,” Buffy explained shortly. “Spell. Dropped it so I could come here.”

He looked at her incredulously. “They agreed to that? Just to collect me?”

“Tried that tack,” Buffy said, grabbing his arm and pulling him left when he would’ve gone straight. “Turns out – the more persuasive argument – was preventing an apocalypse.”

“Right,” sighed Spike. “Apocalypse. ’Course. Where’re we headin’, then?”

“Sunnydale High.” Buffy glanced ahead and rolled her eyes. Three more Turok-Han had appeared down the street, heading in their direction. “Great. More company,” she said grimly, then fell silent to pant for a few seconds, momentarily hating Spike for not having to breathe. “You don’t – seem surprised – to see me.”

He shrugged without disrupting his long, loping stride. “Figured you’d find a way. Annoyingly persistent, you are.”

“Hey!”

“’S a _compliment_ ,” he said, as Buffy ducked into an alleyway between houses to avoid the übervamps coming at them from the front. Spike overturned some trashcans in their wake, which would barely delay their pursuers.

“Gonna have to fight ’em eventually,” he pointed out.

“Don’t worry,” Buffy gasped. “We will. They’re probably – coming – from – the Hellmouth.”

“Well, maybe let’s not _go_ that way, then?” Spike suggested.

“Have to.”

“Bloody – _why_?”

They emerged again into sunlight. Buffy squinted against the glare, trying to get her bearings without slowing down. They were in Xander’s neighbourhood. She hung a right at the next block. “Amulet. For a champion. The one – from –”

“I remember,” said Spike shortly.

“Fucked up dimensions,” said Buffy in one huff. “Dimensional walls. Have to – destroy it.”

Spike came to a shocked halt. When Buffy kept running, he growled and sprinted to catch up, but he was furious. “You want to go back down into the _Hellmouth_. You think it’s still down there. That’s a suicide mission!”

Buffy shrugged, but didn’t have enough breath to argue. She dodged right across a playground, then cut through several deserted backyards. She was regretting bringing all the weapons – they were getting unbearably heavy. Awkwardly, because she was still running, she drew the sword and tossed it to Spike. He snagged it neatly by the hilt without losing a lick of speed.

For all his token arguing, Buffy realized, he’d come with her without a second’s hesitation, without a thought. There was danger, and she was heading toward it, and a fight was in the offing: it was like the Spike trifecta.

They took a wide turn to bring them in sight of Sunnydale High, half a dozen übervamps in a scraggly line trailing not far behind them. At the edge of school grounds, Buffy paused momentarily for breath. Both her gaze and Spike’s were fixed on the front doors. Outside the school, a crowd of Turok-Han were milling around; for the moment, she and Spike hadn’t been seen.

Spike shifted, fangs reflecting sunlight as he smiled in expectation. Settling into a two-handed grip on his sword, he turned to her, and Buffy realized she hadn’t seen him fang-faced in months. He looked almost unfamiliar, and at the same time entirely natural, completely at home, utterly who and what he was, and out of nowhere she experienced a surge of emotion toward him that she barely recognized. It turned her stomach inside-out, pressed her ribcage outward, tremored her knees.

She couldn’t afford it, not now. _This shaking keeps me steady,_ she reminded herself. _Steady_.

The übervamps chasing them had almost caught up. And they were yelling. The crowd in front of the school had heard, turning, organizing themselves for the attack.

“Straight through, then?” Spike asked, and she nodded. For a long second that they couldn’t really spare, they looked at each other. There wasn’t much else to say. Nothing useful, anyway.

Buffy found that strangely reassuring. Some things were simple, in the end. A losing fight, a weapon. One last look. You fought, even when you were outmatched and hopeless. You got up. You lifted your stake. Your sword, your scythe. You said things, or you didn’t, with a look. A look was all you needed. Some things didn’t have to be complicated.

As she started forward, though, Spike grabbed her arm. “Wait.”

He was frowning. Buffy shot a pointed look at the übervamps closing in on them from both directions. “Not a whole lot of time, here, Spike.”

Spike was looking beyond the crowd of Turok-Han cutting across the front lawn of Sunnydale High, his eyes fixed on the front doors. “They weren’t leaving,” he said slowly. “They were going _in_.”

“ _What?_ ” Buffy asked, mystified, but Spike had snapped to life and begun to run, tugging her by the arm he was still holding.

“I’ve got an idea!” he yelled over the guttural shouts of their pursuers. “Come on!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter epigraph is from _Note Book_ , by Jeff Nunokawa – the same Victorian lit scholar whose argument about communication and prayer in _Jane Eyre_ I cribbed way back in Chapter 3. Nunokawa writes a Facebook note every day, starting each one off with a literary quote that he responds to with beautiful thoughts, nuggets of accidental wisdom, startlingly poetic literary criticism, or personal memory and reflection. _Note Book_ is a collection of these notes, and it's really an astounding book.


	14. Chapter 14

_Love me, my violence,_  
_Light of my spirit, light  
_ _Beyond the look of love._

\+ + +

Without thinking about it, Buffy followed Spike, not knowing what he was up to, but trusting in him: in his demon sense, in his knowledge of this dimension, and in his instincts, his fighting blood, the twitch of nerves that told him when to fight and when to run and how to gain an edge. Trusting that he knew what he was doing.

It was weird, really, because Spike had _never_ really known what he was doing. His plans were rarely well thought through, and even when they were, he was too impatient to stick to them. Spike saying _I’ve got a plan_ was kind of like Dawn saying _I’ve invented a new recipe_ – the best thing to do was back away slowly and put as much distance as possible between yourself and impending disaster. So what made this different?

It was her, Buffy realized. It was that she was here; her life would depend on the success or failure of whatever Spike was planning. Whether she could trust him to carry out a battle strategy didn’t, in the end, matter. She could always trust him to keep her alive.

Or to die trying.

Again they ran, the scythe a comforting weight in Buffy’s hands as they tore through the streets with grim determination. After a few blocks, she realized they were heading for Restfield. Spike knew that place better than anyone, better even than she did. He could probably navigate it blindfolded and drunk on a moonless night without stubbing his toe on a single gravestone. Hell, he probably _had_.

He put that knowledge to work now, dodging left and right, losing their pursuers in clumps of trees, bursting through mausoleum doors that looked locked solid and then out through hidden back gates, until Buffy stopped, unable to breathe or to take a single step more, and realized that they were standing next to Spike’s old crypt. And while she could hear Turok-Han shouts nearby, none were, for the moment, in sight.

“Come on,” Spike said again in a whisper. He pushed her through the door, closed it quietly behind them, and hustled her across the room to the trapdoor. Down the ladder, with the stone falling shut above Spike’s head; and then they were in his bedroom.

Buffy froze, momentarily overwhelmed by sense memory and a Pavlovian misery that hit her like a ruthless punch to the stomach. But Spike was already at the back of the room, in the mouth of the cavern that led into the underground tunnels. “Slayer!” he shout-whispered. “Move it!”

Trying to avoid looking at the bed, or the nightstands, or the rug, or… anything, really, Buffy followed him. He’d stopped running, but he hurried along the network of stone-hewn passageways so quickly that Buffy had to trot to keep up. Soon, she was completely lost – she’d never known her way around down here as well as she probably should have.

Finally, Spike slowed up, listening, then stopped. “Think we’ve lost ’em,” he said. “For a little while, at least.”

Buffy leaned against the wall, panting. “Mind telling me –” she said, “what we’re – doing here?”

Spike ran a hand through his hair, which broke apart into several stiff, gelled curls. “I thought they were comin’ _from_ the Hellmouth, right, ’cause, everything else in town was ’xactly the same as it was before I – before – well. So maybe they were, too. Preserved, kind of. Stuck in the cavern, just like they were before I sent it all to Hell. An’ they’d been getting out, bit by bit.”

“Makes sense,” gasped Buffy, still breathless.

“’Cept not really,” Spike argued, “’cause it got worse when your troubles did. An’ then, just now, I realized that they weren’t tryin’ to get _out_ from the Hellmouth. They’re tryin’ to go back _in_. They want to go home.”

“Why?”

“Totally empty here, innit? Well, ’cept for me, I suppose. There’s nothing for them to _eat_.”

She hadn’t thought of that. It was true she hadn’t seen so much as a squirrel here. Certainly no tasty townies, not when there weren’t even any rats. Buffy frowned. “What have you been eating?”

“’M dead,” said Spike, shrugging. The words, and his casual tone, knifed like a thin blade thrust flat into the space below Buffy’s sternum. “Haven’t really been hungry. I’ve snacked a bit on some bagged blood from the hospital. It’s something to do, anyway. But they don’t know this shithole of a town like I do. Probably ready to gnaw their own arms off.”

He set the point of his sword into the stone at his feet and leaned on the hilt absently. “Still don’t know where they’re coming from, though,” he mused.

Buffy had finally gotten her breath back. Mostly, anyway. She rubbed the heel of her palm hard against her chest to ease the pain there. Her lungs felt tired. Tired of inflating, tired of filling and emptying, tired of keeping her alive.

“Probably a neighbouring dimension,” she said. “Or maybe the amulet created another dimension besides this one, and they’re all stuck in there. Either way, I guess the walls between their dimension and this one were breaking down like all the others.”

Spike held up a hand with deliberate patience. His face was stormy. “What do you mean, _besides this one_?” he asked. “And what’s all this about an apocalypse and dimensions and all?”

Buffy winced, thinking of how much there was to explain and how technical it all was; but Spike, seeing that she was about to brush him off, set himself smack in the middle of the tunnel with his arms crossed. “No,” he said. “Your turn to explain. _What the bleedin’ hell is going on?_ ”

\+ + +

They worked their way east again through the tunnels while Buffy told him the whole story, which involved a fair amount of doubling back to explain relevant mystical knowledge, a lot of “I don’t know, that’s just what Willow said,” and multiple repetitions of “Oh yeah, I forgot to say.” By the time she was wrapping up, the formerly rough-hewn tunnels through the bedrock had begun to look more regular – and more familiar. Bits of broken construction equipment had started to appear, shoved into crevices and kicked aside on the floor, all the good bits already scavenged. Pipes ran along the edge where the ceiling met the wall, hissing steam and dripping onto the pathway below.

At an intersection, Spike suddenly threw out an arm to stop her, head tilted as if listening to something above. Then Buffy heard it, too: footsteps, and the sound of a grunt-like argument.

“Where are we?” she whispered.

“Street in front of the school.”

They listened, Buffy breathing as quietly as she could, until finally the sounds moved away. After another minute of silence, both of them relaxed. Buffy saw Spike’s shoulders sink a good six inches in relief, the duster creaking a little with the movement.

That reminded her. “Do you have my book?”

Spike turned. “You want to read poetry _now_?”

For the first time, Buffy’s gut twisted. She’d been so sure he’d have it that she hadn’t checked before. And if he didn’t… “Do you have it or not?”

“Yeah, yeah, keep your trousers on,” Spike groused, digging around the liner of his duster to extract the book from an inside pocket. “’S right here. What’s so bloody important?”

Buffy snatched it from him. The pages naturally fell open to _The Waking_. She’d worn a crease in the spine there. “It’s how we tell Charlie to pull us back,” she explained. Tongue between her teeth, she carefully, delicately worked the page loose from the glue in the binding without tearing it. “Like I said, we have to do it at the exact same time we destroy the amulet. And we both have to be touching the page, or each other.”

“Oh, of course,” Spike said sarcastically. “While holding off a horde of Turok-Han at the Hellmouth. No sweat.”

Buffy glared at him and shoved the rest of the Roethke book back into his chest, holding onto the page with _The Waking_ herself. His hands automatically came up to take the mangled volume. “We’d better,” she said. “Otherwise, we’ll be stuck in some interdimensional no man’s land.” She paused. “Or dead. I wasn’t really clear on that point.”

“Right, ’cause that’s not important at _all_.”

Ignoring him, Buffy stomped past, continuing in what she was now about eighty percent confident was the right direction.

Behind her, Spike huffed and followed. “This bloke Charlie…”

“You’ll like him,” Buffy assured him, then reconsidered. “Actually, not sure you will. But I do. He’s great. He gives me coffee. And his notes. Also, he kind of saved our asses on this one.”

“Wanker,” said Spike, and Buffy grinned.

“No need to be jealous,” she said. “I’m pretty sure he’s gay.”

“Didn’t make that ponce Andrew any less annoyin’,” grumbled Spike. Buffy’s smile widened, but she said nothing, and they walked a few more minutes in silence.

As she thought, though, her amusement ebbed away. Behind her, she could hear Spike walking steadily on, the duster swishing around his legs. She hadn’t realized how familiar that sound was. There was so much about him that was familiar. She hadn’t known how much, and how comforting it had been. His leather-smoke smell, with the faintest acrid edge of peroxide. His square, blunt fingertips: she knew precisely how they felt on her skin. Sometimes, in London, she’d closed her eyes and felt the stirrings of panic that she hadn’t been able to picture his face; but whenever she saw him again, she realized that not the softest, palest hair on the nape of his neck was a surprise to her.

How could she have lost something she knew the outlines of so well? How could she have misplaced him, like a trinket or a box of old Christmas decorations? How could she have let him die?

Buffy halted, one hand curled around the chain links of a door she’d been about to push open, struck still by her silent articulation of that last thought. Was that what she’d been feeling all along? That his death was her fault?

Setting the scythe down carefully so that it leaned against the door, she turned to face Spike. “Did you…” She trailed off. Something in her face, though, must have shown her struggle, because Spike just stood, waiting, patient even when there was no time left in the world. He’d stuck the sword through his belt and his hands hung, empty and unusually still, as if waiting to be opened, to be filled.

“Did you mean what you said before?” she finally asked. “Do you really think I want you back just to make myself feel less guilty? Do you really think I want to – to diminish what you did? That I want to take your sacrifice away?” She looked away from his face, concentrating instead on the toe of her boot, which was kicking at an uneven place in the floor. Quietly, she asked, “Do you really think I want to save you out of selfishness?”

She looked back up at him. He laid a hand against her cheek, then raised it farther to brush a lock of hair away from her forehead, and gently, softly, he said, “Yes.”

Buffy felt like he’d hit her. She tried to jerk her head away, but he’d put his hand back on her face and held her in place. Glaring, she met his eyes, which were pleading, intense, certain. “Could you say, honestly, that you wouldn’t rather it had been you?” he asked. “That it was you, again.”

Buffy wanted to tell him _no_ , she’d learned her lesson, she didn’t feel like that, twice was enough. She was almost certain it was true. She had Dawn to live for. This wasn’t like Glory; it wasn’t a case of Dawn’s life or her own. But something stopped her, froze the words in her throat even as she opened her mouth to speak them.

Deflated, she looked away again, and this time Spike dropped his hand and let her. To the side of her head, he said quietly, “ _Each wills his death: I am convinced of that; / You were too lonely for another fate._ ”

Buffy scrubbed at her eyes, which were dry and burning, as if somewhere very hot. “I can’t be lonely,” she said. “I’ve got family. I’ve got friends. I’m not even the only Slayer anymore. There’s others who know what it’s like.”

“Not like you,” said Spike. “They don’t know what it’s like to be the _only_ Slayer. To have all that power and all that strength and all that terrible destiny to yourself. No one to rely on, no one at all. You’re a hero, Buffy. You’re used to being one. The only one. ’S not usually a flaw. But…”

“This time it is,” she finished for him. She tried to turn her eyes back to his, but couldn’t quite manage it; instead, they stuck on his chin. God, she even knew his chin by heart, the strong upside-down curve in it.

“You’re guilty that it wasn’t you that saved ’em all, and you’re guilty that I had to die to do it, and you’re guilty that you’re relieved that you didn’t. An’ all that is gettin’ mixed up with this new apocalypse, and the fact that maybe you do want me back –”

_That_ got her to look at him. “I _do_ ,” she said, desperately, and as convincingly as she could. “Spike, I want you back more than anything.”

He said nothing, but framed her face with his hands, looking at her for a moment, and then kissed her forehead.

He still didn’t believe her, she realized. All this, and he still didn’t believe her.

She didn’t blame him.

Taking a small step forward, Buffy buried her face in his chest and wrapped her arms around him. His hands came up to cradle her shoulders, one stroking the back of her head. Buffy wanted to stay just like that forever, breathing in his smell, feeling the lean hard muscle of him under her cheek, his hands soothing and sure.

“ _I think the dead are tender_ ,” she quoted back at him, the words muffled a little by his shirt. “Spike…” She shrugged, helplessly, because he wasn’t right, but he also wasn’t wrong, not by a long way. And because she was trapped, by her head and her heart and her destiny and her body, this body that was so strong and was made to carry so much and didn’t know how to do anything else. Didn’t want to do anything else. What had she told Edwards about Roethke? _He’s trapped in his fate, which is tied up with his body, because he’s going to die. He’s just stuck – in his destiny and in his life. Whenever he tries to change his path, he’s just… pulled back._

“It’s what I do,” Buffy said into Spike’s chest. “It’s my destiny. It didn’t have to be yours.”

Spike pulled away, though he kept his hands on her. She felt the air, harsh and cold, all the places he was no longer touching her. “I chose it,” he said. “That’s all. I chose it.”

Buffy searched his face, feeling her eyes jump from one of his deep pupils to the other, each of them the black colour of the top of the atmosphere when all the blue had run out. His delicate nose, his straight brows, the scar cutting through his left one. The rippled shell of his ear. How well she knew him, and, in all the ways that mattered, how little.

A frustrated roar reverberated down the tunnel, bouncing off stone walls and ceiling. Apparently, the Turok-Han had been tracking them, and they were catching up.

“Shall we?” asked Spike. His shoulders had straightened. He’d gone away from her, somehow, even though his hands were still on her shoulders. Wordlessly, Buffy took up her scythe again and walked through the chain-link door.

They were in the basement of the high school now, and Spike took over, leading them unerringly through gray-painted metal doors and rooms filled with boiler steam, until they came to a door they both recognized. With a look at him, Buffy turned the knob and took them into the room with the Seal of Danzalthar.

The room was mostly intact. Rubble littered the ground. In a few places, the floor had collapsed into the cavern below, but nowhere was there a hole large enough to put them in danger of falling through.

The seal itself was open, as it had been when the amulet had buried the town, and with Spike behind her, Buffy went down into it, into the cavern where he’d died.

But as Spike set his foot on the top stair, the door flew open again, hard enough that it bounced against the stone wall. Halfway down the stairs to the cavern, Buffy looked up and saw a Turok-Han appear in the doorway. Then another, and another, and another…

“Run!” yelled Spike, drawing his sword as he stepped back up to level ground. “Find the amulet – I’ll hold ’em here!”

Leaving him to it, Buffy dashed into the cavern, looking around frantically. Without all the Slayers and the army of Turok-Han, and in a state of half collapse, it looked enormous, and utterly unfamiliar. Where could she possibly start?

Buffy closed her eyes, trying to remember. Back it came: the pain in her side, the taste of dust and blood, the cool metal of the scythe in her hand, Spike’s face, lit white and golden from below… They’d been right by the stairs. She remembered Faith calling to her, then running up and leaving them. Spike had been standing in a little niche, like the earth had been cupping him in its palm, ready to take him in. There should be an alcove, here by the base of the stairs…

And there it was, at her feet: gaudy and ugly and shining, with its crystal facets caged in thick silver wire.

“Found it!” she crowed. Her voice spiralled up through a fist-sized hole in the ceiling. Through the narrow gap, she could see Spike holding back a horde of Turok-Han. He didn’t reply; Buffy could hear him grunting with effort, the dull _thwump_ of blade striking bone, the _fwap_ of knuckles on soft flesh. She knelt to grab the amulet off the floor.

And realized she had a problem.

It was as if the stone around the amulet had half-melted, enclosing the edges of the wire cage in rock. Even tugging as hard as she could, Buffy felt no give at all. She lifted the scythe and hacked at the stone around the amulet, not even bothered by the damage she was probably doing to the blade. Nothing helped; even when the rock around the sides of the amulet was completely chipped away, its bottom seemed fused to the ground.

“I can’t get it!” she yelled. “It’s stuck!”

“Do it there then!” Spike’s words were punctuated by a grunt and the clang of metal on stone.

“I can’t,” she called back, watching him through the little hole in the ceiling; all she could see from her oblique angle was his left shoulder and part of his head. “We have to be together so we can signal Charlie at the –”

“– exact same time,” Spike chorused with her, and even over the fighting – he was grappling hand-to-hand with an übervamp now – and through his fangs, she could _hear_ the eye roll. With a heave, he pushed the Turok-Han off of him. Buffy heard the sound of a neat decapitation. “Fine, let me have a go.”

Buffy ran back up the stairs and took over the battle, using her upward momentum to push past Spike and regain level footing at the top of the stairs. She dreaded a precarious fight on the steps, always in danger of a backward fall. Instead she protected the entrance to the stairs like it was precious, trying to stem the tide of übervamps so Spike could work at the amulet in peace. But there were so many, now, and in a moment she’d have to give herself a few steps’ worth of room, and they’d be able to get around her. And then they’d swarm her, front and back, and Spike too, and there would be no time to destroy the amulet…

The stairwell spiralled, so she couldn’t see the bottom of it, but she risked a glance through the little hole in the floor and saw Spike frantically pulling on the amulet, hacking at it, pounding it with the hilt of his sword. “Come _on_!” he roared, but it wouldn’t budge.

Buffy fought to make some space, to hold off the Turok-Han long enough to get to him. But even as she turned and slashed, hacked and punched, kicked, decapitated, fell and stood back up – she knew that if she went down again to help him, or to destroy the amulet by his side, she’d more than likely be cut down from behind on the stairs. Even if she went down backward, fighting all the way, they’d be overrun before she could even get _The Waking_ out of her pocket.

“Spike!” Buffy cried, desperate, as the inevitable happened and she was pushed aside. With all her strength, she cleaved through the chests of two übervamps, but it was too late. A throng of them had teemed into the stairwell, packed tight and descending toward Spike.

“I can’t, Buffy,” he said. His voice was absolutely wrung with pain.

Frantically, Buffy tried to fight her way back to the top of the stairs so she could get down to him; but it was useless. The Turok-Han had breached the stairwell, and were packed into it shoulder to shoulder, jostling each other to be first to the bottom.

“It won’t come,” said Spike. “I’m sorry.”

She was right on top of the little hole, and she looked down at him again, because something in his voice was wrong. Despite the anguish in it, it was too calm, too clear, and so she looked down, and she saw him, and she knew.

The anguish was for her.

“No,” she said, and then screamed, “ _No!_ ”

Spike was fighting off the übervamps, who could only attack him one or two at a time as they came off the narrow stairs; but he had situated himself right in front of the amulet, ready to stab it with his sword.

“You have to do it,” he shouted through the few feet of vertical space between them, all the impossible, uncrossable space, and Buffy felt like she could see the shadow each eyelash made on his cheek, but he might as well have been miles away for how hopeless it was for her to get to him. For the first time, Spike glanced up, and saw the hole in the ceiling, and her face through it. He caught her eye. “Or else we’ll both be übervamp meat. Come on! You have the page!”

“No!” yelled Buffy. “Oh, please, Spike, no.”

But he was ruthless, if she could call him ruthless when he looked at her with so much kindness, so much sympathy, so much love.

“Let me do it,” he said, as quietly as he could and still make her hear him. “Let me be dead. Let it have meant something.”

Buffy stabbed a Turok-Han through the heart with all the force of hopeless anger, though she could no longer see through her tears. “No!” she said, “No, I need you, I need you back. Don’t you? Spike, don’t you need me?”

So much kindness, so much compassion. Even with her blatant attempt at manipulation. He looked at her like he knew all her pettiness, all her flaws, and loved her for them. He looked up at her, and this time the light fell on his face from above, as if she were the source of it. “I need to be a better man,” he said, and his voice was firm and certain, and Buffy closed her eyes for the briefest moment, as long as she dared, because she knew she’d lost. “Without that…”

Buffy heard herself sob once, harshly. “I can’t,” she said hopelessly. “I can’t do it, I can’t let you.”

He’d cleared himself a little space, a second’s reprieve. Just for a moment, she looked down at him and, not angry at all, not accusing – so kind, so gentle, so loving – he said, “Buffy, it’s not _about_ you.”

She was beaten. She was beaten because he was right. Because she couldn’t claim to care about him and yet take this away from him, and because she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life wondering whether she’d rescued him for the right reasons or for the wrong ones. Because she didn’t want to have to decide which reasons were wrong and which were right. None of them were. All of them were.

Buffy let out a wordless sound of despair and laid about with her scythe, with all the strength of heartbreak, giving herself a bare half-second to leap up onto a pile of rubble. Just enough time to take the single page of her Roethke book out of the pocket of the raincoat she was still wearing.

“ _Now_ ,” she screamed. And as Spike turned, stabbing the tip of his sword down into the amulet with all his might, as the übervamps, free now, rushed gleefully for her and swarmed over him, Buffy ripped the page in half.

Instantly, she felt a sensation of being pulled backward very fast into the dark; but in front of her she could still see the Hellmouth, and the Turok-Han, and Spike, a column of white light enveloping him, all shrinking down now to a pinpoint even as the cavern imploded, and more than the cavern: the town, the whole world, imploding and collapsing and dissolving until there was nothing left, nothing but blackness and dust, dust glittering white in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *ducks*
> 
> *pokes head up* Don't kill me! There's still one more chapter and an epilogue! *dives for cover*
> 
> Epigraph is from Roethke's "Love's Progress." Quotes also from his "Elegy" and "[She](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/she/)."


	15. Chapter 15

_(Dreams drain the spirit if we dream too long.)_

\+ + +

They were buttoned-up the rest of the year, but Buffy would say this for the Brits: they pulled out all the stops for Christmas.

December in London was gorgeous. Trafalgar Square boasted one of the biggest trees she’d ever seen, and you could hear the carollers beneath it from the next street over. No corner of the city was left unlit. The department stores went wild with avant-garde decorations and brilliant displays, lighting up the long, dark nights. Harrods strung lights along every edge of its Victorian edifice, making it look like a giant iced gingerbread house. Oxford Street, Regent Street, and Carnaby were aglow with light shows. One evening, while they were out Christmas shopping, Buffy, Dawn, and Willow bought themselves hot chocolates and walked through a luminous Covent Garden, holding their warm drinks in glove-muffled hands.

And – most notable for a Southern California girl – the weather was appropriately frigid. In the mornings, white frost rimed Buffy’s window. People on the street hurried along in long coats and puffy anoraks, wrapped up snug in knit hats and cashmere scarves.

Buffy had time to enjoy it, or at least pretend to Willow and Dawn that she was enjoying it. Things were, for the most part, back to normal. The school term had ended. Despite the fact that night came early now – the sun sank before four o’clock – patrol was lighter. In part, that was down to the temperatures: closing the portals and re-stabilizing the dimensional walls had coincided with a change in the weather. Finally, the rain had stopped, and the days were now clear and very cold. Even demons were staying cozily inside.

But it was hard to feel appropriately festive this year. Buffy was mourning, again, like she had after Sunnydale. But that, she now realized, had been a cottony, congested brand of grief, a haze of misery, exhaustion, and disbelief. And guilt, and a heart-deep denial she’d never really acknowledged.

This felt cleaner. Less angry, more sad, like it was finally over. It was worse, and more painful; but it was the messy pain of picking a scab. Underneath, the skin was healing.

This was also only her third Christmas without Mom. Somehow, in a new place, her absence was more painful than ever. At least in Sunnydale, the house had seemed to remember her. It was like there was always a chance she was just in the next room, and she’d walk in wearing her holly oven mitts and her Mrs. Claus apron, carrying a platter of turkey… Celebrating Christmas without her, somewhere she’d never been, was agonizing. It felt like something vital had been excised from Buffy’s interior architecture.

It wasn’t just her mom, either. As if mourning were an internal contagion, Buffy found herself aching for _everyone_ gone from her life, all the people she’d lost and left behind, no matter how fleetingly their paths had crossed. She missed Tara, her sweetness and her sturdy pragmatism; she even missed Riley’s goofy grin, and Angel’s voice; and she found herself remembering father-daughter days with her dad when she’d been a little girl, when they’d gone to the mall, and he’d bought her ice cream at the beach.

Even Faith she missed, even Amy, even irritating little Jonathan, even the classmates she’d known only vaguely and briefly – because, after all, they’d shared something, some part of their lives; they’d known something about her, and now that knowledge was gone, and that part of Buffy, too, as if everyone who wasn’t here had a cut piece out of her and taken it with them when they’d left. And yet they all felt like peripheral absences, missing pieces and blank spots, matter surrounding a black hole, circling around a few central, gaping vacuums that Buffy couldn’t bear to look at.

It was hard to get into the holiday mood when she felt like nothing so much as a paper snowflake: flimsy, and full of holes.

And she wasn’t sleeping well. Again. Every time she woke up, it was with renewed disappointment that the only dreams she’d had were confused and fragmentary – in other words, decidedly normal. She woke in the mornings and lay in bed for hours, staring at the blank ceiling of her room.

She wished she could stop hoping.

But she tried to keep up appearances for the sake of her friends, who, having finally relaxed after another averted apocalypse, were thoroughly embracing the holiday spirit. That included Charlie. The pint she’d promised him had morphed, somewhere along the line, into an invitation to join her and Willow at Grimmauld Place for a little wine, some snacks, and maybe a movie; which, in turn, had morphed into the three of them sitting around the kitchen table, shoving cheese, Christmas cookies, and holiday chocolates into their faces while polishing off two bottles of cabernet between them. Feeling magnanimous (and more than a little tipsy), Buffy had even let Dawn have half a glass before she’d sent her up to bed.

After that, all three of them had gotten pleasantly and absolutely hammered. Buffy had lost track of how much wine she’d drunk, laughed so hard her face hurt, and woken up in the living room the next morning in new possession of a raging headache and a piece of heavy paper. It had been placed carefully on the arm of the couch, out of the way of flailing limbs. Sketched in pencil was a drawing of her and Willow, laughing. The lines were quick and sure – minimalist, and yet somehow kinetic, vibrating with liveliness and joy. In the corner, in his beautiful calligraphic penmanship, was written _Buffy – Happy Christmas. Charlie._

Meanwhile, Dawn and Pat had taken charge of the Christmas decorating at Grimmauld Place, with a fleet of bemused Watchers under their direction. An eight-foot Nordmann fir had now taken up residence in the living room, tastefully swathed in thick gold ribbon, glass baubles, and white lights. Garlands wrapped the banisters; holly sprigs with gleaming berries were piled in recklessly generous bunches on the end tables; little wooden reindeer cavorted on the mantel above a neat row of traditional white and red stockings. Candles, scented with vanilla or apple or cloves, adorned the side tables and flickered at their own reflections in the windows. Pat, surrounded by baking trays and wearing a flowery (and floury) apron, could now be found at all hours in the kitchen, where the table was set with candles, pine cones, and fragrant evergreen boughs.

Most of the Watchers would be spending Christmas with their families. But on Christmas Eve, they all dressed in their most ridiculous festive sweaters for an enormous supper of honey-glazed ham and roast potatoes. Turkey was for tomorrow, when only Buffy, Dawn, Xander, Willow, and Giles would be there to eat it.

Buffy had thought that Xander and Willow might want to return to the U.S. and join their families for the holidays. But when she brought it up, she was met with blank stares.

“Why in God’s name would I want to spend Christmas with my parents,” Xander had asked, “when I could be spending it with you guys?”

“You guys _are_ my family,” a confused Willow had said, surprising Buffy into tackling her in a hard hug. “Oof!”

Buffy had clung on tightly, until Willow had given a muffled, “Okay, breathing, breathing now.”

Now, looking around the glowing kitchen on Christmas Eve, listening to the chattering of the Watchers (less formal with several glasses of wine and eggnog in them), Buffy could only be thankful. She imagined what it would have been like if she and Dawn and Giles had had to celebrate alone. They’d have tried, but it wouldn’t be the same. She loved them both, and they were her family; but this was better. Smiling a little, she watched Xander try to tell Dawn and Cynthia some story, only to fail because all of them were laughing too hard to breathe.

Wistfully, Buffy tried to picture Spike at the table. At first, the image wouldn’t fit. Spike, sitting pretty in a Christmas jumper, offering comments on Richard and Pat’s spirited debate about Citigroup stock and the upcoming election? But then she imagined him unobtrusively keeping Giles’s wineglass full, smoothing over the inevitable incipient arguments between her and Dawn, telling Cynthia a story of 1920s New York or entertaining Pat with the tale of a failed Victorian hunting expedition, or reminiscing about a schoolboy prank gone wrong – and suddenly she could see it, and she missed him so much it was like someone was taking strips out of her flesh all over again.

But as she took a sip of wine to ease the lump in her throat, Buffy caught sight of Dawn, completely breathless with laughter, one hand on Cynthia’s shoulder to hold herself up while, with the other fist, she pounded on the table helplessly – and Buffy couldn’t help but smile. This _was_ her family and, even better, she was theirs, and there was nowhere else she’d rather be.

Beside her, Giles picked up the wine bottle and topped up her glass. “You all right?” he asked.

Buffy smiled at him. He’d been quiet tonight, but his face held a peaceful contentment, and he looked at her with eyes full of love. His steady voice, quiet beneath the gales of laughter and boisterous chatter, was as solid to her as the wood of the table, the stone of the floor.

She rested her head on his shoulder. “I’m perfect.”

\+ + +

The next morning, dressed in flannel pyjamas and heavy dressing gowns, yawning and holding plates of toast and steaming mugs of tea or coffee, they gathered in the living room under the lights of the tree. Outside, the day was chill and blue, and mist hovered over the gray rooftops, but the living room was bright. Willow lit all the candles and Dawn, bouncing with excitement like she was little again, untacked the bulging stockings and distributed the pile of presents under the tree – some beribboned and professionally wrapped in red and gold foil, others covered in Scotch-taped brown paper.

“Okay,” said Xander through a piece of toast, scattering crumbs all over the carpet, as he pulled something from his stocking, “who got me the pack of demon-themed Valentine’s Day cards?” He was waving around the topmost greeting card, which featured an antlered woman dressed in a corset and fishnet stockings, her horns dripping with slime, above the words _Hey baby, let’s make some Chaos._

Buffy, Willow, and Dawn exchanged glances, then all cracked up.

“Not funny!” yelled Xander. “Where did you even _find_ demon-themed Valentines?”

“I have my ways,” said Willow solemnly.

Once the trinkets, candy, and gag gifts had all been unearthed from the stockings, and Dawn’s chocolate orange had been passed around and thoroughly demolished, they turned one by one to their real presents.

Xander’s gift to Buffy was a gorgeous wooden box, the size of a tea chest, that he’d made himself. It was done in a beautiful burled dark wood, with a complicated marquetry pattern on the top: a diamond with a cross in the middle, composed of wood of all different colours. Pale maple, black ebony, red cedar, brown walnut – even some woods that carried a tinge of blue or green. Buffy ran her fingers over it; he’d sanded it down so finely and with such care that she couldn’t detect the slightest join or flaw.

Xander shrugged away her awed gratitude. “I just wanted to give you back a little bit of something you lost. I know you used to have a wood box on your dresser in Sunnydale,” he said. “But I couldn’t find one like it anywhere.”

“This is so much better,” she assured him.

Willow had given her – wrapped in blue paper emblazoned with cartoon menorahs – a matching hand-knitted hat and scarf, woven with tight, even purls. They were made from unbelievably soft yarn of dark red shot through with threads of gold, and Buffy put them on immediately. They fit perfectly. Not a thread or a stitch was out of place. Over and over, she stroked the plush surface of the scarf. “Willow, they’re _beautiful_ ,” she said. “I love them.”

As Xander unwrapped a video game console and Dawn consulted with Willow on which colour of her new fingernail polish she should try first, Buffy settled back on the couch and turned over a heavy package from Giles. He’d wrapped it neatly in red paper and tied it with twine. A little white card bore his name and hers in his neat capital letters. Carefully, she unpicked the knot, lifted the tape, and pulled the paper apart.

Beneath were four leather-bound books – the most beautiful books Buffy had ever handled. With careful fingers, she turned them on their sides to read the gold-stamped letters on the spine. _Middlemarch. Eliot. Vol I-IV._ The leather on the spines and the corners of the covers was dark green, stretched over marbled boards and endpapers.

“Oh, _Giles_ ,” she breathed, easing one open.

“Oh, um,” said Giles, hastily swallowing his sip of tea. He paused halfway through unwrapping a present of his own. “They’re first editions,” he explained. “All but the third volume, which is from around 1890. The, er –” he pointed – “the bindings are green half calf. They’re not original, but all four are contemporary. 1871. It’s all been recently refurbished.”

“They’re _incredible_. Giles, thank you.” Buffy smiled at him over Dawn’s and Willow’s heads.

“Happy Christmas, Buffy.” He smiled back at her, a fond avuncular smile. Then he ducked his head, embarrassed, and returned to unwrapping the present he was holding, which happened to be from Buffy.

“Merry Christmas,” replied Buffy, but Giles was no longer listening. He was staring, startled, at the contents of the box she’d given him: several signed vinyl albums, mint condition, of various British artists of the 1970s. She’d gotten The Who, The Kinks, and Jethro Tull, among others. Some of the bands Buffy hadn’t heard of, but she’d asked the advice of the bartender at the Chelsea Underground, one of the demon bars she frequented. Whenever she came in, he always seemed to be playing what Buffy thought of as Giles-music. He’d been the one who told her where to find the vinyl shop.

Grinning at Giles’s expression, Buffy congratulated herself on a well–thought-through gift and turned to her final present, which was from her sister. Everyone else was done. Dawn stopped rearranging her bottles of nail polish to watch with a tight face.

She’d clearly wrapped it herself, though she’d done a good job. Whatever it was had a roughly square shape, thicker on one side than the other.

It was a photo album. Buffy opened the cover in silence. The room was quiet now, except for the distant strains of _Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas_ from the radio in the kitchen.

Photo after photo of her and Dawn and Mom stared back up at her. A four-year-old Buffy with her parents at Disney World. Dawn as a toddler wearing Mom’s pearl necklace. Buffy holding a newborn Dawn. Mom and Dawn and Buffy at a restaurant on Dawn’s thirteenth birthday. Buffy and Dawn on vacation in front of the Grand Canyon, their arms around each other’s shoulders.

Buffy put a hand over her mouth.

“It was at Dad’s place,” Dawn said quietly. “I remembered seeing it the last time I was there. I called him every day for a month at four in the morning until he finally picked up the phone.”

Speechless, Buffy just opened her arms, and Dawn leaned into them, and Buffy rested her cheek on her sister’s hair and rocked them back and forth, Mom’s face smiling up at them both.

\+ + +

Shortly after Boxing Day, Buffy got back her grades for the term. She’d managed a B+ both in Brit Lit and Literary Theory, which she counted as a win. Winslow had given her an A.

“I think it’s my first A _ever_ ,” she gushed to Giles. “At least since middle school.”

Edwards had sent each student an email with their grade for the term and their mark on their final paper. He’d given her an A- on both.

_The only reason you didn’t achieve an A on the paper,_ he’d written, _was that I still don’t quite buy your main premise. Nevertheless, well written and solidly argued. Well done._

Buffy was mildly annoyed about that. She’d done a perfectly convincing job of defending her thesis, thank you very much. Giles had certainly thought so when he’d read through it for her. Edwards was just still miffed that he’d been wrong.

Willow, who was on the receiving end of this rant as they made lasagna – or, rather, as _Willow_ made lasagna and Buffy gesticulated fiercely with a sauce-covered spoon – nodded empathetically and let Buffy vent.

But when Buffy stopped by the English department office to drop off some paperwork the week before Lent term began, she ran into Edwards himself.

He came through the door just as she was passing her forms over the high wooden desk, and he leaned against it, grinning at her. She was a little more used to his put-on front of suaveness now, getting a little better at tuning it out. Behind his oily façade, Buffy thought she could detect a little genuine pleasure; the thought occurred that he might actually be chuffed to see her.

“Buffy! Good holiday? Restful?”

“Yeah, it was nice,” she said, truthfully enough, and added, out of politeness, “You?”

“Good, good,” he said, without seeming to know what he was saying. “I suppose you got my email, then. A good result. Very good, no?”

“I guess so.” Buffy was acutely aware of the department secretary on the other side of the desk. Although Edwards was loitering in front of her, Buffy had a clear shot to the door, though she didn’t feel the need to use it just yet. Awkward, she ran her thumbnail over the wooden top of the high desk, feeling the grooves and furrows of the grain.

Edwards raised an eyebrow. “Bit disappointed about the paper?”

“Well,” Buffy hemmed, “I’d thought I’d made a good argument, is all.”

“Are you mad at me?” he asked with a winning smile, as if certain she wasn’t, or at least that she couldn’t possibly be _too_ mad. “I ask because I’m running a mixed undergraduate–graduate-student seminar. It’ll be on the confessional poets. Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell – that lot. It’s by invitation only for undergrads. If you’re not too miffed at me, I was going to recommend you for enrolment.”

For a moment, Buffy was utterly speechless. She couldn’t help but suspect that Edwards had ulterior motives in asking her, and she peered at him intently, trying to read him through his blustering exterior.

But under her gaze, the bluster softened a little, and he held up his hands as if to prove his objectivity and innocent intentions; and she remembered that he _could_ be kind, and had been, to her especially. And he’d been quick and perceptive, and quiet when she’d needed him to be, and he’d managed to say exactly the right thing.

Because she’d looked up the Tennyson poem, after their lunch. She’d cried, reading it. It was something about the voice. Like she could _hear_ the man behind the words, speaking in a breaking voice, speaking with an utter resignation that still wasn’t surrender. A speaker who loved the things that would most hurt him and those nearest him, but couldn’t stop wanting them anyway. A man who was determined that, if he was to die, it would be doing something great. Something worth saying.

Buffy had written out the whole thing and tacked it up next to the Roethke poem by her bed.

She’d never thanked him for it, or for the Millay poem. But then, he’d never asked.

Edwards was still looking at her, waiting. His face was surprisingly guileless, and there was something in it that might have been respect. She’d earned that respect from him, Buffy realized. First when she’d challenged him in class and won, and then when she’d broken through to him with raw honesty.

Whatever his reasons, Buffy came to the conclusion that Edwards was serious, and he was asking because he wanted her in his class, not in his bed.

“I am mad, a little,” she said – somewhat testily, because she was. But she grinned wryly at him to let him know that she was at least partly joking. “But ask me again next week. Maybe I’ll have forgiven you.”

Edwards laughed. “Really? You don’t seem like the forgiving type. You’re built more on the principle of the… oh, of the avenging angel, I’d say.”

Buffy shrugged. Avoiding his eyes, she dug with a thumbnail at a loose splinter in the surface of the varnished desk.

An avenging angel. Ha. Spike had left her with nothing to avenge, no way to seek redress from the universe. He’d gone into its vast uncharted darkness willingly, whole-heartedly.

And she’d let him. Because he’d asked.

Had he known, she wondered, either time – any time – that his life was running short? Could he sense, like Tennyson’s speaker, his days winding up?

_The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:  
_ _The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep_  
_Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,  
_ _’T is not too late to seek a newer world._

It wasn’t the kind of thing he would have told her. Buffy wished, briefly, that it were.

But that wasn’t fair – not to him, and not to her. She took a breath, blinked away the fogginess in her eyes.

Edwards was still quiet, still waiting. She offered him a sad half-smile.

“Well,” she said, “I guess I’m learning to let things go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter epigraph from Roethke's "The Longing."
> 
> Buffy's Christmas present from Giles probably looks something like [this](https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22538210999&searchurl=bi%3Dh%26fe%3Don%26kn%3Dmiddlemarch%26sortby%3D1&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-image15). (If anyone wants to buy me a very expensive Hanukkah gift…?)
> 
> And here again is the incomparable "[Ulysses](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses)," by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.


	16. Epilogue

_Here, when I say_ I never want to be without you _,  
__somewhere else I am saying  
_I never want to be without you again _. And when I touch you  
__in each of the places we meet,_

_in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying  
_ _and resurrected._  
_When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,  
_ _in each place and forever._

\+ + +

Whistling, Buffy spun her stake through her fingers and tucked it back in her belt as she headed out of the graveyard. It was hard not to feel cheerful when even at one in the morning the air held a growing hint of warmth. The daffodils had been and gone already, taking the crocuses and snowdrops with them; the damp air smelled of soil and new grass. Best of all, she had only a few exams left between her and southern Spain.

She and Dawn had been planning the trip since New Year’s. Two weeks, Summers girls only: Seville, Cadiz, Malaga, wine, seafood, tanned boys to ogle, and a little sightseeing. Buffy knew that Dawn, who’d already circled all the museums she wanted to visit in their _Lonely Planet_ , was looking forward equally to the food, the language, and the culture.

Buffy was looking forward to sitting on a beach.

God, did she need a vacation.

Still, London life was beginning to have its perks again, she thought, detouring through St. James’s Park to observe the new buds on the trees in the moonlight. She lingered on the footbridge over the lake, picking out the shadows of ducks sleeping by the shore, heads tucked beneath their wings.

When she finally arrived home, closing the front door carefully so as not to wake anyone, she was surprised to see lights on in the living room. At the faint _snick_ of the lock, hasty footsteps made their way to the hall, and Willow appeared in the foyer, Charlie by her side.

Charlie had become a regular visitor to Grimmauld Place, as much for magic-related _tête-a-têtes_ with Willow as for study sessions with Buffy. He knew all the Watchers and, now that he was more comfortable, he could hold his own with Xander at supper, going barb for barb and roast potato for roast potato.

“Charlie!” Buffy said. “What are you doing here so late?”

Behind him, Val appeared. Stocky, with very short hair, a no-nonsense attitude, and a seemingly endless wardrobe of rugby shirts, Val was the least likely witch Buffy had ever met, but she liked her – her pragmatism, her booming voice, and her absolute zero tolerance for bullshit of any kind. Buffy greeted her with a nod.

“Ah. Business, then?” she asked.

Charlie’s face scrunched into a grimace of uncertainty. “Er – sort of.”

“Um, Buffy,” said Willow, “why don’t you come sit in the living room?”

Suddenly nervous, Buffy sent a sharp look at her best friend. Willow appeared a little anxious, though she was clearly trying to project reassurance. She failed completely – the only expression she was able to produce could just as easily have been the result of minor indigestion – but Buffy was reassured anyway. Whatever this was, at least it wasn’t news of a death. Probably.

The couch was half-covered by a partially completed knit blanket and, on her first try, Buffy sat down on knitting needles. With all three magic experts standing in front of her, she felt a little like she was fifteen again and facing an inquisition from the old Watchers Council.

“Buffy,” said Willow, then took a steadying breath. “We’ve found him.”

Buffy grimaced in confusion. “What the huh? Found who?”

The two witches and Charlie exchanged a grim look, like the situation was worse than they’d realized. “Spike,” said Willow.

Buffy stood up.

“Spike’s dead,” she said.

“No, he –” began Charlie, but Buffy didn’t let him finish.

“He died. _Twice_.” She huffed. “Well, three times, technically. Third time’s the charm, though, right? He’s dead. He – he sort of wasn’t, for a while, but that was just… that was just a dream.”

Something was happening to her mouth: it was running far ahead of her brain, which was spinning in place, but so slowly that all the liquid in her skull might have turned to molasses; and something was happening, too, to that magma chamber in her chest. It had been quiet, recently, but now it was waking. Because this wasn’t just unfair – this was mean-spirited. This was _cruel_. “He’s really, _really_ dead. And you know what? I’m over it. Getting over it. People die, people die all the time – you know that just as well as I do, Will, better than most people. People die, they die constantly and I don’t know why you won’t let them just _stay dead_ –”

“No, Buffy, no,” Willow said, in the half-horrified, half-soothing tone she might use if she’d come across a badly wounded animal. Taking Buffy’s arm, she sat on the couch, pulling Buffy down with her. “He _wasn’t_ killed when the bubble dimension collapsed. He was just – caught. Between dimensions, with no anchor. We were able to track him.”

“The book,” explained Charlie. “I realized he still had the rest of the Roethke book.”

“Yeah,” whispered Buffy. “He did.” Her hand came up and covered her mouth. Twenty minutes ago, she’d been admiring the silver gilding of moonlight on damp new shoots. She’d been watching ducks.

“Buffy,” said Val, and waited until she looked up. Val would tell her the truth. Whatever it was, Val would tell her straight. Val pulled no punches, tiptoed around no feelings. “We can bring him back.”

Val didn’t drop her gaze for a second, and Buffy didn’t take her eyes off her face as she asked, “Are you sure?”

“Positive,” said Willow.

Afraid to allow herself to be convinced, Buffy turned to Charlie. He nodded. “ _Things from sleep_ ,” he said quietly, “ _come easy to the sill, things lost from far away_.”

Buffy’s mouth quirked. “You’ve been reading my book.”

“My own copy, thanks,” said Charlie, with a half-grin; but the grin faded quickly. “While I was tracking him. It seemed – important. To read it.”

Buffy lifted her hands from her lap. Put them down again. How still they could lie, when she let them. “Is it… What’s it like, for him? Right now?”

Willow frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean… is he in pain?”

Val squatted down in front of the couch, putting her face level with Buffy’s. “Not the way you’re thinking. He probably doesn’t have much sense of time. My guess is that he’s aware of things, to some degree. But the human mind isn’t really wired to understand the experience of utter nothingness outside the flow of time.”

“He’s not human,” said Buffy. Her throat hurt, a constricted ache. The thought of Spike, alone in something beyond darkness, beyond the concept of darkness, was like a garotte of piano wire.

Val shrugged. “He’s close enough.”

“Let us try,” Willow urged. “You’ll see.”

Buffy understood: Willow couldn’t comprehend her reluctance. Wishing they were alone, Buffy said to her, “He… might not want to come back.”

“What?”

“He wanted to – to have died for something good. And it only means something if he stays dead.”

“I – I don’t understand.”

“I do,” said Charlie suddenly. “I know what he’s saying. But…” For a moment, he struggled to put his thoughts into the right words. “But he’s wrong. About which part matters. He’s – he flew into the volcano. That’s good, that’s meaningful, in its way. But you can only be an eyewitness if you fly back out.”

“He won’t see it that way.”

“Tough luck for him,” said Val, bluntly. “Convince him.”

“Easier said,” Buffy pointed out.

“Never took you for a coward,” Val retorted, and it cut deep. Because she _was_ scared. Right now, she still had him; he was still hers. They’d parted right. Finally. If she brought him back – if she was wrong about this – no matter how long they both lived, no matter how close, no matter that he was back among the living, she’d have lost him. Unequivocally and forever.

Better rip off the bandage quick, then.

“Can you do it now?” she asked.

The other three exchanged glances again, and Buffy noticed, finally, how exhausted they looked. Willow was pale; Val had deep circles under her eyes; Charlie appeared haggard. It was two in the morning, and who knew how long they’d been working on this, and what they’d had to do.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I just…”

“I know,” said Willow. “It’s only that –”

“We’ll need time to set it up,” said Val. “Not long – a day, maybe half a day.”

Charlie winced. “And I’ve an exam tomorrow afternoon, but I’ll come straight –”

“Whose exam?” asked Buffy. This was good – this was distraction, this normal uni talk; it was real life, something she could understand, a realm in which her feelings were clear. She latched onto it with an almost painful intensity, as she would a life preserver in rough Atlantic seas.

“Parrington? Medieval Literary Culture.”

“Ooh, I’ve heard that’s a nasty one. Someone told me to wait and take it with Professor Chaudhury instead –”

“Yeah, definitely. Wish I’d gotten that advice. Parrington’s a real wanker. He made a girl cry in class. What I heard, the highest mark on last year’s exam was a thirty-two. One bloke got a three percent. He curves them, of course. He just does it to break your spirit.”

“That’s –” But Buffy couldn’t think of anything that it was, anything at all. She turned away so no one would see the way her jaw was suddenly trembling. Behind the couch, from the dining room they never used, darkness leaked in, an ocean of black opening its maw.

“Tomorrow evening,” Willow said, a little desperately. “As soon as Charlie’s back. I promise. Val and I will get it all ready in advance.” Val nodded in confirmation. “Just a few more hours, Buffy. We’ll bring him home.”

\+ + +

It was after seven-thirty by the time everything was set up in the front office. Giles was there, with Val and Willow, but Buffy hadn’t been able to look at him. For the last half-hour, all she could bring herself to do was pace miserable laps of the house, peering into the office whenever she drifted by. It was a Thursday; Dawn was out at her weekly rehearsal-followed-by-chip-shop-run with the after-school drama club. She’d joined sometime in February – mostly, she’d confided to Buffy, because a boy she liked was in it.

“And he’s not a vampire?” Buffy checked.

Dawn had rolled her eyes. “No.”

“Are you _sure_?”

Dawn had thrown the TV remote at her.

Now Buffy couldn’t decide whether she wished Dawn were here or not. On the whole, not, she thought. If Spike were angry, better for Dawn to not be there. Maybe he wouldn’t hold it against her. Maybe he and Dawn could still be friends.

Dawn would want that. So did Buffy.

She paced. Living room, foyer, office. Hallway, kitchen, scullery, dining room, conservatory, lounge, living room. Foyer, office.

She hadn’t been able to sleep. At five in the morning, she’d given up and gone back out into the city. Habit had led her along one of her patrol routes – over to Whitechapel, then across the Thames and down through Southwark and Lambeth. Along the river, behind the Globe, she’d paused and leaned on the rail by the water. All the residual warmth in the air had gone; the early morning was frigid. The sun had been up for half an hour, and with it had come a cold breeze. Commuters hustled back and forth along the promenade with their noses tucked into their collars, hands buried in jacket pockets. Buffy had watched a barge creep by over the brown waves, scudding along on their stiff tops. Across the river, the dome of St. Paul’s caught the faint rosy sunlight.

What was she doing here, she’d wondered. What was she doing.

“Ready!” Willow’s voice echoed along the hallway and fell strangely in the stone kitchen, flattened by the journey, sounding like someone else’s voice entirely.

Charlie had arrived sometime during Buffy’s last lap. When she got to the office, he was shedding his jacket.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“Er – miserable.” He shrugged one shoulder. “But everyone said the same.”

Giles was lighting the last of the candles. The setup was minimal: a circle of white sand, candles, a blanket in the middle of the room. A fire in the hearth, a bundle of herbs thrown onto it. Nothing else. On the desk, the ancient Dell whirred up its fan, struggled uneasily for a few seconds, ticked itself back to sleep like an aged lion.

Charlie was ready. Although he was frowning, his face was somehow smoother, more toned: aimed, focused. His shoulders had settled; his head came up; his back straightened. Willow and Val stood behind him, each with a palm on his shoulder. Willow was holding a book in her free hand.

Giles came to stand beside Buffy. He rested a steadying hand on her back, and she looked up at him, and would have tried to smile, except it seemed her face had become paralyzed sometime in the previous ten seconds.

“Right,” Charlie muttered, as if focusing very hard on something Buffy couldn’t see, something that required fine-grained control and an agile concentration. “Got it. _Now_.”

In a language Buffy didn’t recognize – Dawn would, she thought – Willow began to speak. With her stomach a tight ball of nerves in her gut, Buffy settled in for a tense wait.

But Spike was there.

Nothing else happened – no sound, no lights, no wind, _nothing_. Willow was speaking, and then Spike was lying on the blanket in the middle of the circle, and she stopped.

His knees were drawn up almost to his chest and he lay absolutely still. The duster was wrapped around his legs. One hand was curled near his pale cheek; the other lay on the rug in front of him, like he’d been reaching for something in his sleep. A single lock of hair had come loose and fallen over his forehead.

The room was very quiet. From outside the front window came the whoosh of cars along the road, voices talking then falling silent, the distant wail of a siren.

Giles took two steps forward and scudded his foot through the circle of sand. The candles snuffed themselves out.

Buffy started forward, walking through the gap in the circle. Leaning down, she reached toward Spike’s shoulder, and then pulled back.

“It’s okay,” said Val. “You can touch him.”

“He’ll wake up soon,” said Charlie. He was shaking a little; a thin film of sweat beaded his upper lip, making the blond stubble there more visible. “The journey can be a bit nasty, is all. But he’s fine.”

“How –” The word didn’t come out. Buffy swallowed, cleared her throat. Lamplight on Spike’s skin, making him golden, like he was alive. The curtains were pulled tight. She’d checked. Three times. She tried again. “How long was he… wherever he was? I mean, for him.”

“We can’t know,” said Charlie. He wiped his forehead with the back of one trembling wrist, but his voice was getting stronger. “There isn’t really any such thing as _time_ between dimensions, because time, like space, is dimension-dependent. It might have only felt like a second for him. Or – or it might have been… longer.”

Buffy hadn’t taken her eyes off Spike. She wanted him to wake up. She dreaded him waking up.

“That’s okay,” she said. “We’re used to that.”

Slowly, she crept forward a few paces and knelt, reaching forward inch by inch until her hand was resting on his leather-covered shoulder. She was tempted to brush back that one lock of hair. Instead, she fisted her hand into the duster, feeling the solidity of Spike’s body beneath it. Unmoving like this, unbreathing, undreaming, he looked more than ever like a corpse. Peering at the soft-shadowed skin of his eyelids, Buffy couldn’t tell what she was feeling. Relief, mainly. Guilt. Fear. Despair. A little residual anger that he’d chosen to leave her, again – to sacrifice himself, not to stay and fight, even though all his other options were gone. And tenderness, yes. But beyond that, only a great, yawning uncertainty. _Do you want him_ , Willow had asked.

She did. That was the problem. Because with what felt like every other emotion under the sun swirling around in a confused muddle in her gut, Buffy couldn’t tell if she loved him.

But she knew she wouldn’t survive losing him again.

Unable to help herself anymore, her actions hidden from view of the others, Buffy gently stroked down his cheek with the back of her fingers. The skin was smooth, soft, like a child’s.

Spike’s eyelids flickered.

Scrambling backwards toward the others, Buffy took cover behind Giles and Willow, but she didn’t take her eyes from Spike. A little noise came from him – not a whimper, not quite a moan. His hand clenched spasmodically. He rolled himself onto all fours, and then into a kneeling position, and opened his eyes.

It took him less than a second to take in the room: the small office, with its bookshelves and desk and Persian rug; the little crowd of people in the doorway; Buffy. By the time his gaze found hers, he was standing, and he was livid.

“ _What the_ _fuck?_ ” he screamed, eyes locked on her, and she trembled – not at the fury in his voice, but at the despair. “I thought we – you – Fuckin’ _hell_ , I thought you knew… You _promised_!”

Even as he railed at her, he was patting himself all over, checking his hands, his legs, his chest, making sure he was all in one piece; but the piece he cared about most he couldn’t touch.

“Is it still there?” he asked. “ _Is it still there?_ ”

But Buffy was frozen, horror-struck at his utter desperation, incapable of answering him, and unable to believe he was really alive, and speaking, and in the world. She was shaking, violently and uncontrollably.

“What does he…?” she heard Charlie mutter, and she tried to tell him, _Soul_ , but the word wouldn’t come.

Spike was still glaring at her in furious betrayal. “I thought we had an _understanding_!” he yelled. “Why am I… Why am I _here_?” On the last word, his voice broke, and he had to break off his glower to look up at the ceiling and blink several times. Quieter, he asked the crown moulding, “Why did you bring me back?”

It was if a bomb had gone off in the room. Everyone stood shell-shocked. No one answered him; no one, Buffy thought, knew how.

Under control once more, Spike fixed on Buffy again, still white with rage. But under the anger, she could see, even if no one else could, the raw, flayed wound of broken trust.

“You fucking bitch.”

“Hey!” Willow had found her voice.

“It wasn’t Buffy’s idea,” said Charlie. He indicated himself, Willow, and Val. “It was ours. She didn’t know.”

Spike’s eyes narrowed. “You’re Charlie.”

Since Spike hadn’t bothered with a question, Charlie didn’t bother with an answer. “You’re grumpier than I expected.” But his lips were twitching.

“Well, yeah,” said Spike. “ _Vampire_.”

“Just who,” said Willow – and Buffy was flabbergasted to see her chin wobbling, and hear her voice trembling to match – “do you think you’re fooling, Mr. Saved-the-World-Twice?”

Beginning to calm down now, Spike shrugged uncomfortably, reaching up to rub the back of his neck. “Well,” he said, “seems like I did it wrong the first time.”

Compounding Buffy’s astonishment, Willow took three steps across the room and hugged him.

Spike was apparently as surprised as Buffy. He patted Willow gingerly on the shoulder a few times until she stepped back, wiping her eyes. But his trial had just begun: first Charlie shook his hand, and then – awkwardly, but with surprising warmth, which Buffy suspected was mostly but not entirely for her sake – so did Giles. Right behind him was Val, who introduced herself in her loud, no-nonsense voice and shook Spike’s hand once, firmly. Buffy saw him raise his eyebrows – in response to the solidity of the handshake or Val’s unfazed equanimity at introducing herself to a vampire, Buffy wasn’t quite sure.

And then all four of them were gone, and she and Spike were alone.

No light came through the curtains. The sun had set, or would in a few minutes. Outside, the street was in shadow and, with the candles out, the room was dim, lit only by a spillage of light from the foyer. Buffy listened to Val, Charlie, Giles, and Willow walking toward the kitchen. Once they’d gone into the hall, their footsteps sounded very far away. The office felt like a cave, a sealed one, a place ominous and sacred, cut off from the world.

Spike was still standing in the remnants of the circle. Buffy tried not to look at him directly. She was afraid of his anger, afraid of what he’d say, afraid that she had, after everything, lost him after all. Afraid that when she looked, he might not really be there.

But she couldn’t help but be aware of his every little shift, his every motion and breath, the movements of his fingers and the twitch of his duster. His presence cut a channel through her chest and lodged there, and every one of his movements resonated in her with something like pain. His face was in shadow, but from the corner of her eye, she could tell that he was pointedly not looking at her, either. Instead, his eyes followed Val’s departure.

“Good one, that,” he muttered. “Like her.”

“I’m sorry,” blurted Buffy. Hastily she began examining a bit of spilled sand on the rug; but she saw his head come up. “For bringing you back. Only – only Willow said you weren’t dead, and, and Charlie, he pointed out that it’s not enough to fly into the volcano, you have to come back out again – you know, otherwise it’s just…”

“A gesture,” said Spike, and Buffy was surprised enough that she accidentally looked up, and so she fell into his gaze, his utterly unrevealing, electric gaze, and suddenly there was no oxygen in all of London. She was stranded in the midst of a pounding airless fire, a silent inferno.

_Along red network of his veins / What fires run, what craving wakes?_

“Yeah,” she said, on empty lungs.

Spike looked away. With deep relief, Buffy inhaled the sweet stuffy air of the office as quietly as she could. Leather and dust and hot computer plastic.

“S’pose I should have learned that lesson already,” said Spike.

“When?”

“From you,” he said.

Again the Dell spun up its whirring, modulated the motionless air, and subsided into sleep.

“Dyin’ is the easy part,” Spike said. “Harder to come back.”

Suddenly Buffy couldn’t stay there, couldn’t stay still at all. The room was too hot, her bones too brittle, her blood too full of motion. Wordlessly, she spun on her heel and left the room, though she could sense Spike following behind. His boots were loud on the wooden stairs, quieter on the long carpet runner in the upstairs hall.

Her room faced north, so the sunset was hidden behind the kitchen wing of the house. Buffy went straight to the window and threw it open, breathing deep the cool air, smelling spring and grass. Friendly as always, the tree outside her window waved at her, and she touched one of its green buds with a gentle finger.

Spike came up beside her. He could be dead silent when he moved, and yet he was so solid. Buffy felt like there was something physical in the air between them, a current made into something she could touch.

He leaned his elbows on the sill, his forearms protruding through the open window. Nodding at her tree, he said, “You told me about this rowan. ’S appropriate, you know.”

“What do you mean?” Buffy’s voice sounded creaky. Everything about her own body was stiff and unfamiliar, as if she’d been the one stranded for a time beyond time.

Spike was still gazing out at the tree and the garden wall below. “They symbolize courage. And they’re supposed to protect against witchcraft and enchantment.”

Buffy snorted. Talk about ironic. The amusement broke her stiffness, a little. She copied Spike’s posture, leaning out the window next to him. “Not in this household.”

He didn’t laugh. “That’s the British folklore. The Greeks had their own myths.”

“Yeah?”

“This goddess, right, Hebe, the goddess of youth. They said she had a magical cup. Full of ambrosia for the gods. She lost it to the demons – course she did, the Greeks loved stories of carelessness and idiocy, ’specially if it was a woman bein’ the idiot. Bloody wankers.”

She’d never told him about Anne Carson being a Classicist, Buffy realized. At the time, she’d thought he wasn’t real.

Maybe Spike was fluent in Ancient Greek, too. He could be. She’d believe it.

“Anyway,” he went on, “the gods sent an eagle to fight for the cup. Vicious battle, it was. All the demons against this one creature chosen by the gods. Its feathers were torn out and drifted in the air, an’ its blood fell to earth.” He turned, looking at her. “An’ every place a drop touched the ground, a rowan tree grew.”

It wasn’t _fair_. It wasn’t _fair_ for him to speak in riddles, not fair to go from screaming at her to telling her beautiful, tragic things in a quiet voice, understanding exactly what to say and how to reach her. It wasn’t fair for him to know her so well, to know every detail of her life, each fold of hidden flesh, every goddamn crease of her brain within the secret darkness of her skull. Not fair to make her need his forgiveness _so much_ – and suddenly she hated him for it. Hated him for making her need him, for making her grieve. Twice. She couldn’t tell whether he was still angry at her, and she hated him for that, too, because she had to guess what he was thinking, while he always knew how she felt.

For a vicious moment that she then regretted fiercely, she wished Willow had left him in the cold dark. She searched for something devastating to say to him. She wanted to snap off the rowan twig in front of her face, strip the bark from the tree, wanted to turn and punch him in the sternum so hard she’d hear his ribs collapse, so that his chest would feel as broken as hers.

But she spent too long groping for the appropriately cutting words, and in the meantime, Spike had reached a hand into his duster and taken out the Roethke book.

He tossed it onto the unmade bed, in which Buffy, lying awake and thinking of him, had failed to fall asleep last night. The book sunk a little into the white comforter, innocuous in the dusk light. Buffy could only look at it. Her head felt like the aftermath of a tornado. Taking a step forward, she touched the cool slick surface of the paperback. Her finger left a smudge, glinting white in the blue light. She wanted to throw the book out the window. And she wanted to carry it with her everywhere, this book that had brought him back to her.

She looked at Spike, trying again, unsuccessfully, to intuit what he was feeling. He stared bleakly at the Roethke, then, like a trapped animal, paced to the other side of the small room and back. Buffy, watching him warily, sensed her anger melt away in the face of his helpless distress, like the season’s first snow in morning sun, and felt in its place a kind of protective tenderness that bordered on pity. He’d only just come back to the world, after all. He’d been dead. She knew what that was like, and she bit her tongue and let him pace until he came to rest in front of her again.

“Where’s your local?”

“My – what?”

Spike rolled his eyes, impatient. “Pub. Your local pub. Christ, and how long’ve you been here now?”

“Oh! You – you want a drink?” Buffy asked. Maybe that was a good idea. Get out of the house. They didn’t have to do everything all at once. She didn’t know what to say to him, and she didn’t know what he felt, but Spike relaxed when he had a beer in his hand, or a whiskey. Everything about him became slower, more expansive, like a river delta on its way to the sea. “I don’t go out much. Except demon bars, but that’s – you know, work. There’s, um…” Buffy thought, trying to remember the last time she’d gone out drinking. “There’s a, well, a cocktail bar that me and Willow and Kennedy went to over the summer.” The place had made good drinks, although all the other clientele had had perfect teeth and shiny clothes. Buffy had ordered something sweet and fruity, and it had come with an umbrella, and no one had made fun of her. “I think it’s in Soho?”

“Good lord,” said Spike, and he stalked out of the room. Buffy hurried after him as he swept along the upstairs hallway, peering into each room in turn until he’d found Giles’s study.

The door was ajar; Spike leaned on the round brass doorknob and stuck his head inside. “Oy, where’s your local?”

“Lion and Peacock,” said Giles reflexively, raising his head from whatever document he’d been studying. “Two streets north on St. James’s.”

“Cheers, mate.” Spike withdrew from the doorway and clattered down the stairs, across the foyer, and out the front door, Buffy in his wake. She snagged a jacket from the coat rack as she went by, and was still struggling into it when she caught up to him as he waited for the light to change.

The pub was packed with the after-work crowd: colleagues out for a drink, women toasting each other over glasses of the house red, young men with their suit jackets shucked and ties loosened. All the floor space was occupied by groups milling around, speaking loudly over the ’80s power ballad blaring from a speaker in the corner. Finding a table appeared hopeless, but Spike pushed through the crowd, straight to the back, where three perfectly groomed young men in suits were waiting as the current occupants of a booth collected their jackets. As soon as they slid out, Spike swooped in and settled himself in the booth, giving a bland look to the offended young men.

One of them had the courage of both his convictions and a couple of pints. “Piss off, mate, we were here first.”

Spike only raised an eyebrow. All three guys were fit, toned, tanned, shiny-haired – the kind of twenty-somethings who played football on the weekends and went to the right clubs and spent their generous salaries from their posh jobs at hot restaurants and yuppie gyms. The talkative one leaned down, putting his face right up in Spike’s. “I said, _Piss._ _Off_.”

Slowly, Spike stood. He wasn’t tall, but he somehow gave the impression of looming over all three boys. The bland expression had disappeared. Buffy expected him to flash a little fang, but he didn’t. He only looked at them, bleak and unflinching, and let his hand form a fist on the table. Unwittingly, the man who’d spoken took a step back; and then he’d already lost. Spike caught Buffy’s eye and nodded her into the booth opposite him. She wanted to feel embarrassed, but she was mostly amused, and she pushed past the three guys with a muttered “Excuse me,” forcing them to give up and wander back toward the front of the pub.

“I thought you’d scare them a bit,” Buffy admitted.

Spike sat again, his face twisting bitterly. “Still like a bit of monster, then, do you? Sorry to disappoint.”

Stung, Buffy reeled back. “That’s not what I meant.”

Spike just shrugged. “You’re paying. Didn’t exactly bring any dosh with me from the nether dimensions.” He settled back, stretching his arm out along the top of the booth. “Pint of Newcastle.”

For a moment, Buffy hesitated, confused, but when Spike only looked at her expectantly, she shuffled back out. The long wait at the busy bar – she eventually got fed up and yelled “Excuse me!” until someone finally noticed her – gave her time to get over the confusion and build up, to her relief, an excellent sense of righteous anger.

Returning to the booth, she slammed down Spike’s pint, purposefully letting some splash over the rim, and took a fortifying sip of her cider.

“Screw you,” she said clearly. “You want to be pissed at me, fine. But you’re wrong. There is no way you being dead is better, for anyone or anything, than you being here, sitting in this stupid pub, drinking that… _swill_. If that’s selfish of me – if it’s selfish to want you here with me – well, then, fine. I’m selfish. I’ll embrace that. Be as pissed at me as you want, but I’ll follow you around for the rest of my life to make sure you stay in this world. I’ll show you just how selfish I can be. Because after all this shit, I’m not letting you go.”

Breathing heavily, Buffy loomed over him, leaning her fists on the sticky table for support. Her anger felt good: she gripped it with both hands and clung. Distantly, she was aware that her reaction proved his point – her anger felt good because it made her feel she was in the right, which was in itself a kind of blind selfishness. She didn’t care.

Spike took a meditative sip of his beer.

“I didn’t know you felt so strongly,” he said, “about Newcastle.”

Buffy, caught off-guard, felt her certainty slip a little. She swayed slightly where she stood, unsure how to react.

Then she collapsed into the booth, buried her head in her hands, and laughed until she cried.

\+ + +

Midnight found them wandering northwest of Kensington Gardens, quiet streets of posh townhouses. They’d patrolled earlier, but nothing much had been on beyond a scuffle with a couple of vampires. For a while now, they’d been quiet, just walking together. Occasionally, prompted by a crumbling façade or an antiquated shopfront, Spike would offer some memory of London past – the places he’d gone, the people he’d known. Fast clouds streamed thinly across the sky; it was a dark night, damp and thickening, and Buffy was cold but determined not to mention it.

Eventually, she reluctantly said, “We should head back. Dawn’s going to be livid.”

“It’s late. Bit shouldn’t be up still.”

“Okay, _you_ tell her that.”

They came to rest at an intersection, not crossing the street to walk any further, yet both apparently unwilling to turn back just yet. When they’d left the pub, it was as though they’d also left behind everything that still needed to be dealt with – their residual anger, the question of their relationship to each other, Spike’s plans for the uncertain future – and they both sensed that all those issues would be waiting, like Dawn, just inside Buffy’s front door.

Spike stuffed his hands into his duster pockets and nodded at the low, somewhat dour brick building across the street. “Used to be a convent there,” he said. He paused, then added quietly, “I grew up ’round here.”

Astounded, Buffy looked at the tidy, well-kempt Notting Hill houses lining the road, their entrances flanked by columns and shaded by manicured trees. A few window boxes, still winter-bare, signaled the tidy, well-kempt planting soon to come. “ _Here?_ ”

“Wasn’t so posh then,” explained Spike. “Middle class, upper middle class, that sort. Then it was the artists movin’ in. Even got pretty grim here for a while after the Second World War – I was long gone by then, course.” Spike leaned against a lamppost, hands moodily in his pockets.

Buffy looked from him to the building across the street, thinking of all the lives he’d lived, all the history he’d seen. Like London, she thought. Like his city. Enduring, just enduring, while things happened in and around it. She wanted him to tell her everything, she realized. Everything he could remember, every detail of his life. She wanted to listen to the years roll out in his voice, his poetry voice that made every word beautiful. She wanted to sit near him and listen to him speak. She wanted to be near.

“Last time I was here was – oh, late ’80s, just when it was comin’ up again –”

She kissed him.

This time it was slow and sweet, little heat in it, just tenderness, and Buffy trembling in London’s ancient April wind, and the light touch of fingertips to cheeks, smell of smoke and leather and clean air and rain coming, and the sound of cars, and grass ruffling and trees creaking, and somewhere over London a night bird calling once, and again.

Buffy released him slowly, breathed soft against his lips.

“Stay,” she said. “Stay here with me.”

“Buffy…” Spike stepped back and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. Watching him, her stomach sinking, Buffy felt colder than ever. A gust of wind rattled the budding branches, slapped damp and chilly against her cheek.

“’M not all that different, you know,” he said. “Remember I told you people don’t change. They don’t. I didn’t, not really. Human, vampire, soul, no soul. In some ways, I’m the same bloke I was when I lived just down there, same as I was when Dru turned me, same as when I tried to kill you the first week we met. Same person. Same monster.”

He put his hands on her shoulders and looked her in the eye. “Buffy,” he said, “you don’t want that person.”

Buffy took a breath, fighting to stay calm. It was important; it was _vital_. “You don’t get to decide what I want, Spike,” she said. “I thought that was the whole point of what you told me in the dream dimension. We don’t get to decide things for each other. Let me choose. Let it stand. Let it be.”

Spike stared into her face for a long moment. When she finally saw something settle behind his eyes, she shrugged. “Besides,” she pointed out, “there have been times I’ve been kind of a monster myself.”

Spike trailed a finger along her jawline, and said in an aching voice, “But you make me feel like a man.” He gave a sad smile, tilted his forehead against hers. “ _Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love_.”

“Yes,” whispered Buffy, “all,” and she kissed him again in front of all the silent houses while, in the spring night, over a dreaming London, it began to rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter epigraph is once more from contemporary poet Bob Hicok, this time from a beautiful poem called "[Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem](http://www.pa56.org/ross/hicok.htm)."
> 
> Roethke quotes come from "[Supper with Lindsay](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=103&issue=1&page=109)" and "[The Renewal](https://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=1&poet=37&poem=2094)"; there's also a callback to Sylvia Plath's "[Pursuit](http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/poem/pursuit/)."
> 
> While putting this chapter together, I discovered something really cool! The National Library of Scotland has made available online an _incredibly_ detailed map of late-1800s London. You can scroll around and see every individual street and building. It's [here](https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=17.956666666666667&lat=51.5141&lon=-0.1043&layers=163&b=1).


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